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Copyright, 1922, by 

The National Board of the 

Young Womens Christian Associations 

of the United States of America 

Printed in the United States of America 



DEC 12 72 



CU692415 



TO 
MY FATHER 



TABLE OF CONTENTS 



Chapter I. Where the Problems Begin 
Chapter II. Pathways to God 
Chapter III. Jesus, the Truth about God 
Chapter IV. The Experience of God . 
Chapter V. Something Wrong with Us 
Chapter VI. What Must I Do? . . 
Chapter VII. The Church . . . 

Chapter VIII. Prayer 

Chapter IX. The Goal of Life . . 
Chapter X. Where the Problems End 



i 

19 

37 

55 

75 

95 

115 

i37 

159 

185 



PATHWAYS TO GOD 



GUjapter (§m 

Wtyv? tty? Problems fcjw 



I DON'T know what I believe." "If this or that 
cannot be squared with present-day scientific 
conclusions, is there anything left of my child- 
hood faith?" "What am I to believe about God and 
Christ, about prayer and immortality, about suffering 
and sin?" "What shall be my attitude toward the 
church?" "Isn't one religion just as good as another, 
if you live up to it?" Hosts of queries like these arise 
from the youth of to-day and demand instant and satis- 
factory solution. "A question mark rampant over three 
bishops dormant with motto query, is the coat of arms 
of to-day," someone has wittily remarked. 

One of the crowning glories of youth is its insistence 
that all these puzzles of thought, age-old though they 
be, shall and indeed must be answered at once. This 
demand for the truth about God and man and the world 
is the driving force which makes for progress. But the 
briefest experience convinces us that final answers are 
not forthcoming. Ready-made solutions fit only the 
standardized mind. They bulge at the neck or are 
short in the sleeves when tried on anyone who shows 
a suspicion of individuality. We must live with these 
problems all our lives, getting new glimpses of the truth, 
stating the problem in a new way, standing on the shoul- 
ders of our fathers that we may see the farther hori- 
zons, and applying to the changing human situations 
the old and abiding principles of life. 

But if final solutions are out of our reach, we are not 
doomed thereby to unending doubt and confusion and 



uncertainty. We may be just as sure of arriving at a 
working faith, if we "hold fast . . . firm unto the end," 
as we may be sure that truth in its full-orbed beauty is 
better than our best and truest conception of it. In this 
study we shall seek such a working faith. 

What question shall we put first? It is more impor- 
tant to know where to begin our questioning than it is 
to be able to reel off somebody else's answers. And 
more important than that is the attitude of the ques- 
tioner. What shall my attitude be toward the puzzling 
questions which concern religious problems? Let us 
begin with the latter query, for perhaps as many people 
lose their grip on religion through an unconsidered atti- 
tude of mind as through the acknowledged difficulties 
of belief. 

I. THE ATTITUDE OF THE QUESTIONER 

He must be sincere in his desire to know the truth. 
The "sermon taster" in "Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush," 
who was so expert in sampling the various brands of 
sermonic food has her counterpart in the student who 
confers with every traveling secretary or college 
preacher solely because he or she has the conference 
habit and wants to add another specimen to a large col- 
lection of interviews. 

Little children sometimes ask questions which con- 
tain within themselves the answers, just for the sake, 
apparently, of making conversation. "Why do you 
water the plant so that it will grow, for?" is a fair 
sample of scores of questions which one small child of 

4 



my acquaintance will ask in a single day. The social 
motive which prompts such questions is commendable 
in the child, but questions which arise out of conclu- 
sions already formed from a mind already closed on the 
problem do not make for the discovery of new truth. 
They are not genuine. 

But genuine questions however trivial they may seem 
are profitable because they lead sooner or later to the 
big questions which really matter. The cure of many 
a small confusion is to face the ultimate question behind 
it. We fool with little doubts, many of them unworthy 
to be dignified by the title of honest doubt because they 
are really no more than mental laziness or tempera- 
mental moods. I once knew a college man, who because 
he was a cripple, had more time for thought than the 
average student. He found himself confronted with 
many intellectual difficulties and so he decided to stop 
fooling with his little doubts and face the supreme issue. 
He decided to live for six months as though there were 
no God. His was no cheap or superficial denial with 
the lips for he told no one of his determination, but he 
tried with the whole endeavor of a fine mind to shut 
God out of all his life. He came out of that experience 
with a faith which could not be shaken. Not all his 
intellectual difficulties were solved by the experience 
but they were put in their proper perspective. 

He needs to remember that faith outruns reason 
although it must run in the same direction. This is a 
distinction which we must develop more fully in our 
discussion of the meaning of faith, but it is essential to 
the right attitude of the questioner that such a distinc- 

5 



tion shall be pointed out at the beginning of our study. 
Personal religion may be warm and vital before any of 
the great problems of religion are fully answered. The 
Christian faith calls upon us to establish the probabili- 
ties of its fundamentals by putting them into practice 
long before we can demonstrate them to our intellectual 
satisfaction. The Christian religion offers us a working 
hypothesis for life which we are asked to try out. Jesus 
talked about the birds and the flowers but his thought 
leaped past test tube and microscope to the astounding 
conclusion that "your Heavenly Father feedeth them" 
and "God doth so clothe the grass of the field." 

The New Testament does not ask us to begin with 
primitive man's childlike ideas of God and then climb 
laboriously the long ascent of man's thinking; it asks 
us to begin with the God and Father of our Lord Jesus 
Christ. We are under every obligation to test that 
hypothesis in laboratory and library. But we are 
asked, first of all, to test it in life, since it is, first of all, 
a way of life. And if we can establish in this way a 
probability as to the reasonableness of faith, we can 
then proceed to test the fundamentals of that faith in 
every possible direction and with the least loss of 
warmth and vitality in our religious life. Is not this the 
glory and the power of Christ's message? Whether a 
man holds a pick or a shovel, a test tube or a micro- 
scope in his hands, he has in the Christian faith a work- 
ing hypothesis for the relationships of life. It was 
Jesus' method to meet men's perplexities in this way. 
He dared them to make the venture of faith in the 
realm of practical living. "Follow me," he said. Their 

6 



thinking lagged behind in that discipleship, but the 
reasonableness of the Master's way of life held them. 

He needs humility. There are several ways of acquir- 
ing the requisite humility for such a study as we are 
facing. The best way would be the laborious but won- 
derfully fruitful study of the history of man's thinking 
through all the centuries on each of the problems which 
we shall discuss. How few are the fundamental ques- 
tions which have not been asked and intelligently an- 
swered by thoughtful men living millenniums before our 
time. Just because their modes of thought are unlike 
our own, we are tempted to think them but children, 
when it is our own ignorance and egotism which keep 
us from seeing into the minds and hearts of the men 
of past ages who thought well and to some purpose. 
Will the folk of the year 2000 smile as contemptuously 
at our attempts to state and solve the riddles of to-day 
as we smile at the folk of the year 1000? 

Think of but a single illustration. The war and its 
consequences have brought vividly before us all the 
great unsolved problem of suffering. Why this sort of 
world in which little children must suffer not only to the 
third and fourth generations but unto many generations 
for the sins of the fathers? Jeremiah looked for a day 
when it would no longer be true to say, "the fathers 
have eaten sour grapes and the children's teeth are set 
on edge," but that day has not yet come. As we face 
the puzzling problem of suffering, it is a good exercise 
in humility to read and ponder the Book of Job. For 
the author of that book went to the depths of the prob- 
lem and his answers include practically every solution 

7 



which has ever been suggested, and he who tries to 
answer the question about suffering without relying 
upon the work of the past is apt to fall into the diffi- 
culties which wise men saw and avoided thousands of 
years ago. 

And then humility will come to us as we occasionally 
turn our minds upside down and shake ourselves out 
of the ruts of thinking which so easily hem us in. It is 
wholesome to remember that we are a problem for so- 
ciety and perhaps a problem for God just as truly as 
society and God are problems for us. We get so used 
to thinking of the universe as our nut to crack and our 
puzzle to put together that we forget the other and 
equally important side of the same question. Espe- 
cially is this true of the student attitude. The student 
is urged and enticed to think of all problems as awaiting 
his solution and of all causes as lost unless he places 
himself at their head. But the student himself is just 
as much a problem to his home, his faculty, his com- 
munity, the business or profession which he decides to 
grace as these institutions can possibly seem to be to 
him. 

And it is just thinkable that we are God's greatest 
problem, and that while we debate and argue about 
Him, He is seeking some means of access to our 
crowded thought life and into the ambitions and hot de- 
sires that well up within us. At least such an attitude 
ought to help us to a proper humility, that we may take 
off our shoes as we tread the holy ground before us in 
this study. 

The questioner, then, needs sincerity, the knowledge 

8 



that faith becomes reasonable enough for all practical 
purposes before we can untangle every perplexity, and 
a genuine humility. 

II. THE FIRST QUESTION 

All the problems begin with us. And this is more 
than to say that men and not animals or angels raise the 
perplexing questions about God and man and the world. 
It is to say that we ourselves are the first perplexing 
question. The man behind the question, — Why does 
he ask it? What manner of being is he? What is he 
meant to be? How far has he got on his way? Does 
he need any help? Is he fitted to receive any help? 

The first question to put is, What about me? Not 
what about God or immortality, but what about me? 
Strangely enough this is the last question in the history 
of thought to which man has given systematic attention. 
Yet it is clear that it ought to come first, for suppose I 
should reach a satisfying conclusion about God only to 
discover that I have no need of Him or that I am not 
such a being as to be able to have any dealings with 
Him, then my efforts will have been wasted. 

Obviously we cannot undertake to follow here the 
track of the modern psychologist. Such a task would 
be beyond the scope of this little book. We can only 
roughly block out the outstanding characteristics of the 
human with especial reference to his religious life, and 
then test our observations in the sphere of our own ex- 
perience. This does not mean that we are to undertake 
a morbid sort of self -analysis. That would be just the 
wrong way to begin our study of the religious life and 

9 



its problems. Jesus did not encourage ingrowing reli- 
gion. When the rich young ruler came to Jesus inquir- 
ing the way to eternal life Jesus told him that he needed 
to turn away from thoughts about himself and his own 
goodness or badness, to cut loose from it all and forget 
himself in the kingdom enterprise. (Mark 10:17 ff.) 
Self-consciousness is weakness and it is one of the beset- 
ting sins of youth which our study should help us to over- 
come. We need then a laboratory in which to work in 
order that we may study objectively this self which is 
so close at hand. "A man's religion," Professor Hock- 
ing has said, "is the hiddenest thing in him." How 
shall we get at this hidden deep-lying thing without 
probing morbidly in the recesses of our own lives? 
Fortunately we have a wonderfully sufficient laboratory 
ready to our hand. 

III. THE BIBLE AS A LABORATORY 

The Bible contains the most complete collection of 
human specimens in existence. Human beings in action 
and meditation, in hope and despair, in faith and skep- 
ticism, in courage and cowardice, in love and hate, walk 
through its pages. The Bible is richer in types of 
humanity than any city street. The "rich man, poor 
man, beggar man, thief, doctor, lawyer, merchant, 
chief," are all there with variations and sub-classifica- 
tions. The pages of the Bible are thronged with people 
who invite investigation and reward the patient investi- 
gator by relating their experiences and by exhibiting 
their motives with a realism which is often startling. 
One of the reasons why millions of copies of the Bible 

10 



are sold each year is because it is packed so full of 
human as well as divine life. One has only to select at 
random and from memory a score of Biblical characters 
as different as Jacob, Esau, Jezebel, Joseph, Deborah, 
Lot, Samson, Ruth, Amos, Paul, Judas, Dives, Lazarus, 
Job, Hosea, Simon the Zealot, Solomon, Herod, Joseph 
and Mary. What a medley of passions and motives and 
problems these names bring to mind! 

And the people in the Bible are so like us in every 
fundamental way! To be sure, the Bible deals pretty 
largely with the Hebrews, a single race. But it shows 
that race in contact with at least a dozen different peo- 
ples. It runs the gamut of all the known types of 
patriotism from the narrowest most intense nationalism 
to the most exalted ideal of sacrificial national service. 
And again the economic and social situations which the 
Bible reveals are quite different from our own. But we 
can find here and there in this laboratory men with a 
startling modern message, the great prophets with their 
call to social justice, for example. And at the center of 
this book there is Jesus, whose life and teachings have 
been illuminated by our modern social and economic 
situation, until we see that his concern about individ- 
uals, "even the least of these," has behind it something 
more august than mere sentiment. His passion was 
that "humanity might be organized according to the 
will of God" as Rauschenbusch has paraphrased the 
"Kingdom of God." 

The people in the Bible are like us. We do not need 
to commit ourselves to any theory about the unchange- 
ableness of human nature. We have only to confess 

ii 



with humility that we have not changed very much from 
some of those weak and erring Biblical characters and 
that the most splendid of them are still beyond us in 
their achievement. We turn, then, to the Bible for 
help in answering our first question, What about man? 

IV. AT WORK IN THE LABORATORY 

Take for example the vivid biography of Jacob 
(Genesis, chapters 25-33, except chapter 26). How 
faithfully his chequered career is described and with 
what realism! It is not always a pleasant picture and 
more than once we find ourselves sympathizing with 
Jacob's victims. The bitter struggle characterizing 
Jacob's life is described, with grim humor, as beginning 
at the birth of the twins, Jacob and Esau. Then the 
famous birthright incident follows, in which Jacob by 
a base deception planned by an ambitious and unscru- 
pulous mother and executed by an apt and willing son, 
defrauds his short-sighted if more likeable brother. 
The guilty Jacob flees the country. His conduct up to 
this point reveals only an energy and ambition employed 
most ignobly. Covetousness, falsehood and cowardice 
seem to be his outstanding traits. But with dramatic 
contrast, and at the same time with faithfulness to 
human nature, comes the vision at Bethel just at this 
moment of spiritual bankruptcy. God appears to Jacob 
and we are made to understand that other factors be- 
sides selfishness and ambition are seeking the mastery 
over his life. 

The fog lifts only for a moment, however, and then 
shuts down again. The dealings of the crafty Jacob 

12 



and the crafty Laban are only raised above the plane 
of the sordid by the love of the former for Rachel, a 
love which mastered the selfish schemer so that seven 
years "seemed unto him but a few days for the love he 
had to her." Between the two kinsmen it was "a case 
of Shylock versus Shylock, of steel cutting steel : Laban 
is sharp and unprincipled but Jacob is able to surpass 
him in the game of wits." It is the same crafty Jacob 
who steals away from Laban, not penniless as he had 
come but with his wives and his flocks and his herds. 
Then, with the wronged Esau awaiting him and the 
hostile Laban behind him, he comes again as at Bethel 
face to face with God in the supreme crisis of his life. 

We need to unthink our modern thoughts to sense 
what happened to Jacob at the ford of the Jabbok, but 
there is enough of the nomad in us all to make us 
breathe more quickly as we think of that midnight 
struggle. Faith has been quick to seize upon each detail 
of this classic story to symbolize religious experience, 
for it is rich in spiritual and artistic possibilities. Each 
may see it as the record of some spiritual struggle in 
his own life. It is enough to say that Jacob came to 
close grips with the Unseen. He had been a "religious" 
man throughout his life. Even the trickery had had its 
place as forwarding the plans which he felt to be in- 
cluded in God's future for him. "Although his religion 
was the bargaining type, it was genuine and the most 
powerful force in his life. Energy, persistency and 
ambition were the other qualities which enabled him at 
last to triumph over his glaring faults of meanness, 
deceit and selfishness. His life as portrayed, vividly 

13 



illustrates the constant conflict going on in every man 
between his baser passions and his nobler ideals. Jacob 
is the classic prototype of Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. 
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. His experiences show clearly 
how in divine Providence the varied fortunes and espe- 
cially the misfortunes of life, may develop the nobler 
impulses in the human heart, and how the meanest and 
most unpromising men are never beyond the pale of 
the divine care."* 

If Jacob is a conspicuous example of a mean and un- 
promising man who yet possessed spiritual potency, 
David is a conspicuous example of a man after God's 
own heart who yet possessed glaring weaknesses. 
Idealized and idolized as the great king is in the later 
Hebrew accounts, the plain tale of his sins is interwoven 
with the nobility and beauty of his character in the 
books of Samuel. His really notable statecraft and 
military skill we may pass by save to note how diplo- 
macy and genuine religious feeling are so intermingled 
in his career that we cannot always distinguish them. 
Was it partly diplomacy and shrewd political insight 
which made David spare Saul's life, and punish the 
messenger who finally brought tidings of his death, or 
was it only a deep and genuine reverence for the person 
of the Lord's anointed? At any rate David's story 
offers a nice study of mixed motives. 

When we think of David's personal traits, the same 
complexity is present. He was lovable and loving. 

*This summary follows very closely the comment in Heroes and 
Crises of Early Hebrew History, by Professor C. F. Kent, p. 101 ff., 
and the quotations are from the same source. 

14 



Think of his friendship for Jonathan. Remember the 
mighty men who brought water "from the well of Beth- 
lehem which is by the gate!" and of the humility and 
genuine loyalty to Jehovah which his refusal "to drink 
the blood of the men that went in jeopardy of their 
lives," reveals. (II Samuel 23:13-17.) He was a mag- 
nanimous and loyal friend. Although cruel in warfare 
perhaps he was less so than his enemies. His personal 
valor cannot be questioned. He had tact and vision and 
ability which he tempered with humility. 

But the lie which this same David told to the 
priests of Nob cost eighty-five of them their lives. (I 
Samuel 22:6-23.) His sins of adultery against Bath- 
sheba and murder against Uriah bore their loathsome 
fruitage not only in David's life but in the unsavory 
lives of his sons, Amnon and Absalom, Adonijah and 
Solomon. Of Adonijah it is remarked, "his father had 
not displeased him at any time in saying, Why hast thou 
done so?" We are not surprised that David had little 
to say of counsel or rebuke to his sons in the latter years 
of his life. 

It is only to see David as he was, that we point out 
the blot on the escutcheon. His knightly figure, strong 
and beautiful, was not unmarred by sin. 

V. SOME TENTATIVE CONCLUSIONS 

No self-respecting investigator will be satisfied with 
studying two specimens. Fortunately there is almost 
no limit to the opportunities which the Biblical labora- 
tory affords, but for the moment we must be content 
with these two and put forward some tentative conclu- 



sions in regard to the first question we have raised, 
What about man? 

We are a mixture of good and bad. The one is as 
natural to humanity as the other. "Real man is both 
altruistic and selfish, sympathetic and egoistic." No 
one in this laboratory is utterly and "naturally" bad. 
Jacob's early days are filled with unpleasant practices 
but even the black beginning of his career is relieved by 
higher moments. Even Judas must have had qualities 
which led Jesus to choose him as one of the twelve. 
When theologians have talked about the "natural" man 
and his utter badness they have arrived at him by strip- 
ping him "of all altruistic traits, of all spiritual potency, 
of every upward-striving tendency. It hardly needs to 
be said at this date that there is no such being as this 
so-called 'natural' man. He is an artificial construction. 
He is no more real than the Jabber wock is. He is an 
abstract figure, existing nowhere outside of books."* 

Nor is there anyone in this laboratory of men who is 
utterly and naturally good. Theologians have seldom 
tried to represent the natural man in ttiis light, but we 
all share the satisfaction which comes with the belief 
that a large part of our sins are really chargeable to 
our ancestors or to society as a whole. What a comfort 
to mothers to know that what little Willie is doing is the 
result of forces playing through and upon his little life 
causing him to do things which are undoubtedly wrong 
but for which he can hardly be held accountable. If 
only Willie himself could be rid of the "something in- 

* Second Period of Quakerism, Braithwaite, Introductory Chapter 
by R. M. Jones. 

16 



side him which he can't do what he wants to with" he 
could view the situation with the same philosophic calm. 
But for some unaccountable reason his disturbing con- 
science charges him with at least contributory negli- 
gence in the sinning of his ancestors and society. There 
may be discovered extenuating circumstances for most 
of the sinning which the Bible describes but the sense 
of guilt is ever present. 

We are meant for something more than we have 
attained. This is expressed or implied throughout the 
Bible. On almost every page humanity is seeking for 
fuller life. There is a restlessness, an urge, a divine 
discontent from beginning to end. What is it that men 
are after ? Paul sums it up in a noble phrase, "till we 
all attain . . . unto a fullgrown man." We want to be 
full grown persons. And the omnipresent sense of fail- 
ure haunts us. Our commonest phrases reveal it. Mr. 
G. K. Chesterton has said, "If I wish to dissuade a man 
from drinking his tenth whiskey and soda, I slap him on 
the back and say, Be a man! No one who wished to 
dissuade a crocodile from eating its tenth explorer 
would slap it on the back and say, Be a crocodile!" 

We need help. The Bible is likewise one unbroken 
testimony to the fact that we need help to be full grown 
men, and that tirelessly we have been searching for the 
help we stand in need of, — searching and finding. 

Motive power for the achievement of personality is 
the supreme need of humanity. How and where human 
folk have got help for living the fullest life, that is the 
central question of our study. 



17 



(Efjapter 5fom 



Patfjumya to (&ab 



" T F he had not found near the end of his adolescent 
period an organizing, centralizing and construc- 

-■- tive power, his story would have been vastly 
different. But fortunately he did find the centralizing 
power, — 'the key,' as he calls it, ' which opened life to 
me.' Constructive energy swept into him as though a 
mountain reservoir of power had been tapped, and this 
youth evidently marked with hysteria . . . rose into a 
robust and virile man, 'stiff as a tree and pure as a bell,' 
ready to stand the world with its jeers, its blows and its 
barbaric prisons; able to carry his message on foot or 
on horseback through England, Wales, Scotland, and 
Ireland and to carry through an amazing western mis- 
sionary journey through Barbadoes and Jamaica, across 
to the shore of Maryland, up to the New England colo- 
nies and back to the Carolinas."* These words in 
which Professor Rufus Jones describes the experiences 
of the young George Fox, the founder of the Quakers, 
hit off the need of everyone who stands at the beginning 
of life. The organizing, centralizing and constructive 
power, the key which the young George Fox found was 
the experience of God within the limits of his own per- 
sonality. God who was commonly believed to speak 
through such recognized channels as priest and Bible, 
had spoken directly and immediately to him. 

The Bible takes it for granted that there is a God 
who is a Person. Even those parts of the Bible which 

* Beginnings of Quakerism, Professor Rufus Jones; Introduction, 
p. xxxi. 

21 



raise the question as to whether God cares anything 
about man, or those passages which give expression to 
the desire that God would leave man alone, as Job does 
on occasion, do not raise the doubt as to God's exist- 
ence and personality. These are two very large assump- 
tions, but it can hardly be questioned that the men of 
the Bible got help for their lives or failed to get it and 
so made shipwreck of those lives according to the way 
in which they related themselves to the Unseen. It is 
quite worth our while to test this statement and if we 
find it true to ask what led them to this relationship 
with a personal God. 

It is worth our while because we need a working reli- 
gion to-day, that is to say some organizing, unifying 
relationship with life as it is which will give us the key 
to it. Many voices confirm this need. It is almost a 
commonplace to say that the need of the world is a 
spiritual need, the need of a new spirit, a new attitude 
toward life. The hundred-foot dinosaur is found only 
in the natural history museum because he could not 
adapt himself to a changing environment. We have 
built a dinosaur civilization and unless we can get 
astride it and run it, it will fall over on us and crush us 
as it so nearly did in the late war. We need men and 
women big enough to run the machine; not "men to 
match our mountains" for we have tamed and har- 
nessed the mountains and we know how to make them 
lie down or roll over at our bidding; but men who shall 
know how to use the great mechanical civilization which 
has been produced in as purposeful and detached a 
fashion as they use their high-powered motors on 

22 



errands of service or mercy; men who will not go "joy- 
riding" in the wonderful and powerful car of modern 
civilization. 

And to produce such manhood and womanhood we 
must arrive at some worthy relationship with life. We 
need a working religion. 

I. HELP IS AVAILABLE 

When one studies the careers of the outstanding fig- 
ures in the Bible, he discovers that in every case the 
"key which opened life" to them was a relationship with 
God. At least these people themselves felt that such 
was the case. Think of four such outstanding figures 
as Moses, Amos, Isaiah, and Paul. Let us look at them 
in turn for a moment. 

The achievements of Moses are among the most note- 
worthy of history. He took a group of serfs very 
loosely bound together by racial ties and sundered by 
clan loyalties and jealousies and made out of them 
something like a nation under circumstances which were 
often disheartening and always difficult. He gave them 
the beginnings of a constitution and a code of law. He 
was a prophet, a statesman, a soldier! How shall we 
account for his magnificent achievement ? His training 
at the court of Egypt gave him practical lessons in 
statecraft which stood him in good stead in the desert 
difficulties. His shepherd life in Midian and his con- 
tact with the religion of Midian rounded out his educa- 
tion. He had native ability and initiative which early 
revealed itself even though it found misdirected and 

23 



rash expression. (Exodus 2 : 1 1-15.) But none of these 
factors are given as the key to his achievement in the 
Biblical narrative. There, the organizing experience of 
his life is declared to be a vivid religious experience 
which took place when he met and related his life to 
God. And the subsequent history of the Hebrew peo- 
ple for many generations was so associated with the 
mountain where Moses is reported to have met God 
that we can hardly escape the conclusion that some 
tremendous happening was staged there. 

Amos, the shepherd-prophet of Tekoa, is peculiarly 
attractive to the modern because he interpreted religion 
in the terms of its social and moral implications. Right- 
eousness as he interpreted it, meant justice and honesty 
and fair dealing between man and man. He helped to 
shift the basis of religion from the ceremonial to the 
moral. He was not constructive in the same way as 
Moses. He left no institutions behind him but he 
cleared away the rubbish of unsightly structures that 
others might build. Whence came this fearless clear- 
eyed man and where did he get such insight? It might 
be argued that Amos had made a social survey of 
northern Israel, so well does he know the conditions 
there. But where did he get the courage to speak out? 
By what authority did he condemn conditions which 
had the sanction of both church and state, he, a rude 
shepherd of the hills? The motive power of his mes- 
sage was God. The relation of cause and effect between 
God's command and Amos' unsparing prophecies was 
as certain and as clear to him as the facts of his daily 
life in the desert. When you see two men walking 

24 



across the desert together, said Amos, you know that it 
is because they have agreed so to do. It is a deliberate 
plan, for in the trackless wastes men do not just chance 
to meet. And when you hear a lion roar in the desert 
there is always adequate cause for it. No lion roars 
unless he is ready to spring upon his prey, else he would 
frighten his quarry away. When a bird skimming 
along the horizon is suddenly seen to fall, it is because 
the trap has been sprung. (Amos 3:3 ff.) For every 
effect there must be an adequate cause, the prophet 
seems to argue. "The lion hath roared; who will not 
fear? The Lord Jehovah hath spoken; who can but 
prophesy?" 

Isaiah, the prophet-prince who gained the ear of 
kings and made his presence felt in the counsels of 
state, saw more immediate results from his work than 
did Amos. He consistently advocated the unpopular 
principle of neutrality as between Babylon and Egypt. 
It was wise and statesmanlike counsel as subsequent 
events showed. How did he arrive at such a policy? 
He was trained like Moses in the royal court life. He 
knew the 'international situation, the might of Babylon 
and the might of Egypt and the folly of an alliance with 
the one which must mean invasion by the other, since 
little Judah was the buffer state. He had the genius 
to see that "in quietness and confidence shall be thy 
strength." And yet this is not Isaiah's own explanation 
of his counsel. He tells us that when he was a young 
man, he went to the temple and had a vision of God, 
seated on a throne, high and lifted up, and he sets forth 
the meaning of that vision in vivid symbolic language. 

25 



(Isaiah, chapter 6.) It is the key to all his achieve- 
ment. 

Or think of Paul, the lawyer, the poet, the mission- 
ary, the statesman. It is possible to trace in his life 
story and in his letters the various influences of his 
training and experience. He got dialectic skill from his 
rabbinic training and love of sports from the arena at 
Tarsus, and unusual breadth of vision from contacts 
with the cosmopolitan life of Greek cities, and a passion 
for righteousness from the Hebrew blood in his veins. 
But he does not give any of these diverse elements as 
the key to his life. The organizing experience for Paul 
happened on the Damascus road. Paul's own explana- 
tion of his life, as given to King Agrippa, was that he 
had not been "disobedient to the heavenly vision." 

These men got help for their lives, a simplifying or- 
ganizing experience which enabled them to live adven- 
turously and to some purpose. They had a working 
religion. But if the experiences of these Biblical heroes 
are merely isolated wonders, if they show no intimation 
of spiritual laws which we may discover and apply to 
our lives, they are our despair rather than our inspira- 
tion. For how are we to come at this Help? What are 
the pathways to God? 

II. PERSONALITY AT ITS BEST A PATHWAY TO 
GOD 

The spiritual biographies to which we have referred 
in the previous section are not simple or obvious. So 
far we have only dealt with them as great facts. Some- 
thing happened to these men which shaped and organ- 

26 



ized their lives in a powerful way. They attribute their 
experience to the personal action of a living God upon 
their lives. He seems, as we read these accounts, to 
have laid hold upon these men for His own purposes. 
Is it possible to say more than that something unac- 
countable happened to them, something beyond our 
analysis ? How did these men find God ? Is there any- 
thing about their experiences which will illuminate our 
pathway? 

Look at their lives again with this query in mind, Is 
there anything in the experience of a Moses or a Paul 
which will help me to find the key which will open life 
tome? 

If one reads the old familiar story of Moses, for 
instance, with such a question in the back of his mind, 
he is apt to discover that it is not just a pious bit of his- 
tory threadbare and dull in its coloring but a spiritual 
biography quivering with life on tiptoe. The page 
headings of our Bibles bring back the story of Moses 
in the most prosaic fashion: Israel oppressed in Egypt, 
Male children slain, Kills an Egyptian and flees to 
Midian, His marriage, The Burning Bush. The last 
item always fires the imagination, for flame answers to 
flame, the inner to the outer as it did in Moses' case. 
Let us pass by for the time the external features of this 
meeting with the Unseen, the bush which burned with 
fire and yet was not consumed and the Voice which 
spoke so clearly, and try to imagine what was going on 
in Moses' mind and heart. It would be a great experi- 
ence to cross the seas which separate us from the little 
country of Palestine, and then to journey into the south- 

27 



country and find the land that was Midian, and then 
to identify the very mountain where Moses had his 
revelation; and if we could find the very sheep trail he 
followed that day over the back of the mountain and 
the bush itself, what a discovery that would be! It 
would be exceedingly valuable to know beyond a 
shadow of a doubt just where the mountain Horeb-Sinai 
is to be located. But he who discovers the pathway in 
mind and heart that led him to God, makes a far more 
valuable discovery for himself and for others. 

What was Moses thinking about as he walked the 
hillside so many centuries ago? Could he have been 
thinking of anything save the wrongs of his people? 
What had been the dominant motive of his action and 
the consuming passion of his heart? Was it not along , 
the way of sympathy for them and yearning for their 
deliverance that his heart was moving that momentous 
day? For them he had left the court of Pharaoh, for 
them he was an exile. Was not that the inner pathway* 
that led him to God? At any rate God met Moses on 
that pathway. "And Jehovah said, I have surely seen 
the affliction of my people that are in Egypt, and have 
heard their cry by reason of their taskmasters; for I 
know their sorrows; and I am come down to deliver 
them out of the hand of the Egyptians. . . . And now, 
behold, the cry of the children of Israel is come unto 
me: moreover I have seen the oppression wherewith the 
Egyptians oppress them." It was as though Moses 
heard the voice of the Eternal saying, Moses, Moses, 
do you think that you alone care for those Hebrews, 
that there is no clearer Eye than yours to see, no more 

28 



compassionate Heart to feel, no mightier Hand to re- 
lieve? "Why so hot, little man?" And as a result of 
that revelation Moses went forth a changed man and 
things began to happen. His hot little soul was linked 
with the comprehending soul of God. His fickle pur- 
poses were steadied by the will of God. His uncertain 
wisdom was enlarged by the companionship of God. 
That which was best and noblest in him had led him to 
God. It has ever seemed inconceivable to the men and 
women who have thought most deeply that Truth and 
Justice and Mercy and Love are not in the very nature 
of things. They have been led to believe that as a 
stream cannot rise higher than its source so the best and 
highest in us flows forth from God Himself and when 
we feel the lift and the urge of a noble impulse it is a 
pathway which will lead us God ward. 

Each spiritual biography which we have studied in 
the preceding section reveals the same pathway to God. 
The great prophets seem to be forever saying, between 
the lines of their messages, If in my own heart this pas-, 
sion for righteousness and truth, this love for unlovely 
people, this hatred for hypocrisy and injustice and sin 
moves me to do things which I shrink from doing and 
for which I must pay the price in sneer and taunt and 
suffering, there must be a Heart more loving than mine, 
a Mind more farseeing than mine, a Hand more power- 
ful than mine, a great Person who stands above and 
beyond all persons and is yet seeking to work in and 
through them. 

In the case of Amos his burning sense of the injustice 
done the poor, "they have sold the righteous for silver, 

29 



and the needy for a pair of shoes," led him straight to 
the God of all Justice. It could not be, he seemed to 
reason, that God is other than One who declares, "Let 
justice roll down as waters, and righteousness as an 
ever-flowing stream," else the whole world is deceitful 
and illusory. But nature moves in orderly sequence. 
"The lion hath roared; who will not fear? The Lord 
Jehovah hath spoken; who can but prophesy?" 

Is it possible to read between the lines of Isaiah's 
vision (Isaiah, chapter 6) in similar fashion? May we 
discover the pathway along which his mind was mov- 
ing? "In the year that king Uzziah died I saw the Lord 
sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up," he begins his 
account of his vision, the key which opened life to him. 
As we read his prophecies we are made to feel how 
heavily the needs of his countrymen and the wrongs of 
the times weighed upon him, no doubt had weighed 
upon him since he was old enough to understand the 
situation. And then the king died. In his time this 
king had been a strong and able ruler, but in his last 
years things had gone from bad to worse in the southern 
kingdom. And now he was gone. One great man gone, 
another needed. It was with this sense of need that the 
youthful Isaiah went to the temple that day. And into 
his troubled mind came the word "Whom shall I send, 
and who will go for us?" Another and a Mightier and 
a Holier was concerned for that little kingdom. It was 
the best and noblest in Isaiah that led him to God. 

How easily and quickly these great heroes of the 
Hebrew story seem to have found God! But Moses 
waited a generation in the Midian country and who 

30 



can say how long Amos dressed sycamores or Isaiah 
lived in the court of Judah before they walked the path- 
way that led them to God? At any rate it was no 
smooth and easy pathway which Paul followed. The 
road to Damascus seems in exactly the opposite direc- 
tion from the ways along which these others whom we 
have studied were following. Was Paul moving along 
the course of his own best self when he received his 
vision? Apparently not, for he was bound for Damas- 
cus to hound out Christians and bring them back to 
Jerusalem for punishment. And yet one of the accounts 
of that vision (Acts 26:14) reports that Paul heard a 
voice saying, "Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me? 
it is hard for thee to kick against the goads." What 
goads were these against which Paul kicked even while 
he was displaying such zeal in persecuting the Chris- 
tians? Paul had a passion for righteousness! He, 
wanted to be right, not merely to be called right! The 
extraordinary zeal with which he carried out the letter^ 
of the law indicates that he was trying that method to 
the limit and hoping against hope that it would bring 
him that sense of inner righteousness which he craved. 
And then I think that Paul was ever a great democrat. 
Jew though he was, he was reared in cosmopolitan Tar- 
sus and he knew its life and even loved it if the many 
illustrations which he uses from Greek city life are an 
indication. When once he became a Christian, how 
quickly he saw that the gospel was good news for every- 
body, Jew, Gentile, male, female, Barbarian, Scythian, 
bond and free. Paul's feet may have been treading the 
Damascus road but his mind and heart were seeking 

3i 



a pathway that could lead to a right spirit and good 
news for all humanity. 

Think over these spiritual biographies again. It was 
not as these men thought about themselves that they 
found God. It was through their thought about others. ^/ 
A sense of the need of others in which, to be sure, their , 
own needs were included, led them to find that Other 
who cares more. And that was the key to life for each 
one of them. 



III. NATURE AS A PATHWAY TO GOD 

We are still under the spell of the feeling that it is 
almost pagan to see God in nature. But the Bible is 
full of it. While it is true that the highest heights of 
the Old Testament are those passages in which men 
found their way to God through their sense of need and 
their sense of justice and truth and mercy and right, yet 
these same prophetic souls did not hesitate to interpret 
every aspect of nature as revealing the mind of God. 
The volcanic conditions around the northern end of the 
Salt Sea were forever associated in their minds with 
the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. The terrible 
plagues which came upon the Egyptians were the mani- 
festation of Jehovah's mighty hand. It was He who 
blew the sea back with an east wind all night long that 
the Hebrews might escape from the pursuing Egyptians 
and it was Jehovah's eye which "looked forth (in the 
lightning flash?) on the host of the Egyptians through 
the pillar of fire and of cloud, and discomfited the host 
of the Egyptians." The thunders of Mt. Sinai were the 

32 



audible evidence of his presence. Deborah and Barak 
won their glorious victory over the Canaanite coalition 
not simply because the river Kishon overflowed its 
banks clogging enemy chariot wheels, but because 
"From heaven fought the stars. From their courses 
they fought against Sisera." Elijah's triumph at Mt. 
Carmel over the priests of Baal was sealed by the light- 
ning and the rain though he had yet to learn that the 
still small voice in the heart of a man is more potent 
than nature's majesties. The thirsty deer panting for 
the waterbrook is a picture to the psalmist of the human 
thirst for God. And so we might go on. They were 
like children, these Hebrews, innocent of the scientific 
lore which a little child of to-day can command but 
finding their way to God as they walked the pathways 
of nature. 

We need only to return for a moment to the story of 
the burning bush to discover one way in which nature 
leads us to God. As Moses walked that sheep trail over 
the mountain absorbed, perchance, in the wrongs of his 
fellow countrymen in Egypt and restless with a noble 
discontent, he needed to lift his eyes that he might learn 
that Another heeded their wrongs and sought his co- 
operation. But what should arouse Moses to under- 
stand that God's care and sympathy enveloped and sur- 
passed his own? The burning bush. "I will turn aside 
and see this great sight," said Moses. And forthwith 
Nature had made him forget himself in the contempla- 
tion of her mysteries. And as he beheld, that mingled 
awe and love which we call reverence, stole over him. 
"Draw not nigh hither: put off thy shoes from off thy 

33 



feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy 
ground." And then God could talk to him. His eyes 
had been lifted to the level where he could see God. 

Reverence is a pathway to God. And reverence is 
born of wonder. There is too little wonder. Go to, 
now, and be reverent, we exhort, and the miracle does 
not come off because reverence is not created by exhor- 
tation. We need rather to say, Come now and let us 
wonder together about the stars and the sea and the 
flaming sun and the tiniest flower and the "shapes of 
things, their colors, lights and shades, changes, sur- 
prises, and God made it all." And as we wonder 
together, reverence is there among us because it belongs 
in such company. 

There is too little wonder in our lives. "Better a hut 
to live in and a palace to wonder at, than a palace to 
live in and nothing to wonder at." And we live in the 
palace which a knowledge of Nature's ways has created 
for us and forget that though we have harnessed her 
lightnings, there is still much to wonder at. The most 
prosaic setting cannot rob us of the beauty and wonder 
of life if we have the eyes to see. It was a railroad 
telegrapher in Zanesville, Ohio, — and unless telegraph 
offices in that city are far different from the usual sort, 
there must have been little of beauty or mystery in that 
setting, — Edward Curran, by name, who could write 

I walked out in God's house across the grass 
Seeing its beautiful carpet and green walls, 

His stairways of the hills where He could pass 
And tramp up on their steps across his halls. 

34 



I saw his chairs, the flowery paved plateaus, 
His soft divans and tufted velvet dells; 

And saw his hearth out where the sunset glows 
Where He sits calling night with mellow bells. 

IV. THE LIMITATIONS OF THESE PATHWAYS 

There are obvious limitations to these methods we 
have just been considering. All through the Old Testa- 
ment there is a sense of failure to find the Help men 
need for their lives which parallels a triumphant sense 
of the discovery of that Help. A Moses and an Amos 
and an Isaiah through their splendid personalities find 
their way to God. But many another must have missed 
the pathway altogether. And whatever discovery of 
God even the best of these good and great men arrived 
at must necessarily have been limited by their own 
ideas of right and wrong. To the leaders of Israel in 
the time .of the conquest of Canaan, the highest loyalty 
to Jehovah required that they sometimes "devote" cap- 
tured cities to Jehovah, which meant nothing less than 
that they put to death every living creature, men, 
women, children and animals. This they did as the 
command of God. In the famous passage between Saul 
and Samuel over the disposal of Agag (I Samuel 15:1- 
33) this limitation comes to clear expression. Saul 
sought to spare the enemy chieftain but Samuel hewed 
him in pieces before Jehovah. If Saul's motive in at- 
tempting to save his enemy had been a loftier humani- 
tarianism, a clearer understanding of the character of 
God and what he requires, and if Samuel had slain Agag 
from adherence to mere barbarian instincts, the decision 

35 



might be reversed; but the account clearly shows that 
Saul acted from other than the highest motives and that 
Samuel was true to the loftiest standard his own mind 
could apprehend. 

God can and does reveal Himself to men through im- 
perfect and uncertain, even through childish concep- 
tions of Him. Men did get aid for their weaknesses, 
answers to their cries, and direction and power for their 
living as they climbed the steep ascent of their own best 
impulses and purposes. So long as faith bore such 
fruitage in their lives as the eleventh chapter of He- 
brews describes, we can hardly afford to smile at the 
inadequacy of their conceptions of God and the uni- 
verse. And yet the limitations of this way to God are 
clear. 

And so it is with Nature. She speaks with clearness 
and force of a God of love and of wisdom, but only to 
the few, unless they have first come to know such a God 
in other ways. To others Nature is "red in tooth and 
claw." And to the many she is inarticulate. 

Is there any better way to find a God? 

The Christian message is, that human personality 
and its possibilities have been made luminous in the life 
and words of Jesus of Nazareth; that He is humanity's 
finest flower; that as we follow Him we are led along the 
pathway of the best of which personality is capable, not 
alone our own uncertain best, to a knowledge of the 
God who seeks expression in all men's lives as well as 
through a wonderful world of nature. And this we 
must think of together. 



36 



3fe0us, % Qlrttfff about don 



IN a little study manual called "God in Every- 
thing," purporting to be the letters of Miriam 
Gray to Parson John in answer to certain ques- 
tions raised by the latter, the following passages occur. 

Parson John writes, "There is something about your 
way of looking at things which I like. Many of the 
religious people that I know, when they talk of religion, 
have a bedside manner and walk about in felt slippers. 
And if they speak of God, they always tidy themselves 
first. But you go in and out of all the rooms in God's 
house as though you were quite at home. You open the 
doors without knocking, and you hum on the stairs, and 
it isn't always hymns either. My aunt thinks you are 
not quite reverent; but, then, she can keep felt slippers 
on her mind without any trouble. I would really like 
to know if you were always like this, or whether, as S. 
says, it is your happy temperament, or what it is." 

Miriam Gray replies that she was not always like this 
and that it isn't her happy temperament. "Until about 
three years ago I used to think the right thing was to 
tidy up, and be grave and prepared in my mind. But 
now it is different, oh! so different. What is the differ- 
ence, you say? Well, I'm not quite sure, but I think it 
is something like this. All that time the world was 
really a school. And though I called God Father, I 
really thought of Him as a lot of other things first — 
Schoolmaster, King, Lord Almighty, and so on. It 
never really got down into my mind that He was my 
Father. And now it is different. I'm not at school; 

39 



I've come home. Only for the few! Yes, that's one of 
the devil's favorite lies. He is always trying to make 
us divide the human beings made by God into two 
halves, with a gulf between. Do you think that when 
Jesus Christ was talking to people as He did, He be- 
lieved that He had two audiences — those able, and those 
temperamentally unable, to know their Father?" 

And so one might go on quoting passages which 
reveal an experience of God so real and so wonderful 
that the writer seeks to make it known to others. How 
difficult it is to tell another the deepest experiences of 
life! But buried in these letters there is a sentence 
which throws a gleam of light upon the pathway to God 
which we seek to tread. "I must know the God of Jesus 
Christ Himself for myself/' Miriam Gray had met a 
radiant and beautiful Person, who spoke always of 
Another, his Friend and Guide and Father, and she 
cried out "I must know that Other for myself." 

I. JESUS REVEALS GOD 

"Master," said Philip, "cause us to see the Father: 
that is all we need." "Lord, teach us to pray." The 
disciples who made these requests were good Jews who 
had back of them the rich religious heritage of Israel. 
They believed in God and in prayer. Yet all that they 
knew about religion seemed poor and inadequate when 
they stood in the presence of Jesus. In spite of the 
spiritual mountain peaks of the Old Testament upon 
which stood men like Moses and Amos and Isaiah and 
Jeremiah, Philip's cry, "Cause us to see the Father," is 

40 



our common cry. But why should we turn to Jesus to 
answer this, the deepest need of humanity? 

His whole life was a relationship with God. We do 
violence to the life of Jesus when we try to separate his 
character or his teaching or his service from his rela- 
tionship to God. He Himself credited every choice, 
every serviceable deed, every revelation of truth to his 
own intimate relationship with an unseen One whom He 
called Father. To call men to imitate the character or 
service of Jesus without revealing to them, as He con- 
tinually did, the source of what He was and what He 
did, is to make the Christian program a mere idealistic 
vision impossibly high and hard. No wonder Christian- 
ity is sometimes felt to be a mere dream. It is a dream 
unless behind it there is a God such as Jesus knew. But 
if God is the kind of being Jesus knew Him to be, then 
the program of character and conduct which Jesus out- 
lined is not only workable, but, in the long run, it is the 
only workable way of living in the world. We some- 
times say, "Well, I don't know anything about theology, 
but I am willing to try to live my life after the pattern 
Jesus set. I will strive to follow Him." The Christian 
life is living like Jesus, we say, and that simplifies every- 
thing. Christianity is just the Sermon on the Mount, 
and we don't need anything more. Put the Sermon on 
the Mount into practice and the problems of the day 
will be solved. But all this belongs to what Professor 
Hocking calls the "very true." It is "very true" that 
the Sermon on the Mount if applied would solve all our 
problems but how apply it? It is "very true" that liv- 
ing like Jesus is enough. But how does one get the 

4i 



power to live that way? To say that electricity will 
light a great building is "very true" but wires must be 
laid and contacts made and the skill of the electrical 
engineer be applied, else the statement is mere empty 
platitude. What will save the starving millions of 
Russia ? Food will. But food won't unless at infinite 
pains it be gathered and transported and shipped and 
transported again and distributed to those who need it. 
And in the same way it is too easy to say that Chris- 
tianity is the Sermon on the Mount. "How does one 
live the Sermon on the Mount?" is the question which 
will face anyone who genuinely experiments with the 
least precept of it. And we turn to Jesus to see if we 
may discover. 

The mainspring in Jesus' life was his relationship 
with God. Every choice in his life Jesus expressly 
credits to this relationship with a heavenly Father. As 
a boy of twelve He dedicated his life, not to welfare 
work, but to "my Father's business." Each of the 
temptations was put behind Him as He related his life 
to the Father's will. At Caesarea Philippi He met 
Peter's tempting words with the rebuke, "thou mindest 
not the things of God but the things of men." The 
gospels are at one in revealing the fact that Jesus 
shrank from the death that awaited Him at Jerusalem. 
It was his conception of the Father's will which led Him 
to stedfastly set his face to go to Jerusalem. In Geth- 
semane He said, "Abba, Father, all things are possible 
unto thee; remove this cup from me: howbeit not what 
I will but what thou wilt." Jesus explicitly and im- 
plicitly declared that relationship with God was the 

42 



central fact of his life. Is it fair to stress his character 
and service and neglect this, the source of both? In 
what character of history is the organizing principle so 
consistently maintained as in his life? 

He who has dealings with Jesus must have dealings 
with God, for they belong together, not because some 
theologian has said so but because in actual practice one 
simply can't get hold of Jesus alone, always there is this 
relationship with the Unseen whom He knows so well as 
Father, always He carries our thoughts to this Other 
One with whom He lived in such constant fellowship. 
In one of the loneliest moments of his life, when He 
foresaw that all his disciples would fail Him, He said, 
"And yet I am not alone because the Father is with 
me." One never thinks of saying of Jesus, "He came 
into the presence of God." He lived in that presence 
all the time. 

Jesus' teaching was an unveiling of the character of 
God. This accounts for the manner of it. "He taught 
them as having authority and not as the scribes." He 
did not teach by authority, but as having authority. 
He did not need to affect the authoritative manner for 
there was an authority resident in Him. His was the 
authority of the powerful personality. But it was more 
than that, it was the authority of truth. Men who have 
technical knowledge become authorities, we say, in their 
lines. Their authority is not given them by the state 
nor is it due necessarily to anything remarkable about 
their personal powers but they are witnesses to facts 
which lie beyond the knowledge or skill of most of us. 
We say they are authorities. Jesus possessed an au- 

43 



thority of that sort which was evident to the folk who 
listened to his teaching. He taught as though He knew 
whereof He spoke. Yet He had no appointment from 
the state nor is his personal magnetism the main source 
of the authority of his teaching. What did Jesus know 
that other men did not? What gave his teaching its 
authority? 

Jesus knew God, and his teaching is an unveiling of 
the character of God. The Sermon on the Mount needs 
to be studied not simply as a program of human con- 
duct, but as Jesus' statement of the way God would act 
under perplexing human conditions. He draws for us 
the picture of God in a human setting. He does not 
base his teaching on expediency. He does not give a 
reasoned explanation of each precept. Out of his own 
God-consciousness He outlines with simple, firm strokes 
the way to live. That the sanction for the Sermon on 
the Mount is the character of God is explicitly stated, 
in the concluding verse of the fifth chapter of Matthew, 
where Jesus declares, "Ye therefore shall be perfect, as 
your heavenly Father is perfect." 

When we look at the specific teachings of this Ser- 
mon on such matters as almsgiving, fasting, prayer, 
anxiety about money and food and clothes, we find that 
each single teaching is keyed to the heavenly Father. 
The religious acts are to be unostentatious because "thy 
Father who seeth in secret shall recompense thee." 
Showy piosity receives showy recognition ("they have 
received their reward"), but sincere and earnest devo- 
tion pays larger returns because God is that way; that is 
to say, the universe is run on those lines. Similarly the 

44 



duty of forgiveness is not set forth as an arbitrary com- 
mand or a legal formula but it receives its meaning from 
the fact that "if you forgive men their trespasses your 
heavenly Father will also forgive you." Moreover we 
are not to be anxious about such things as money or 
raiment or food because God looks after the birds and 
the flowers of the field and He cares more for persons 
than for things or animals. 

The beatitudes reveal the same attitude of mind on 
Jesus' part. He does not seem to be saying that the 
poor in spirit ought to possess the kingdom of heaven or 
that in some future time they are going to be arbitrarily 
rewarded by receiving it. He seems to be stating a law 
of life which is in actual operation here and now but 
which men have been slow to discover because they 
don't know the nature of things, — that is to say, the 
nature of God. It is the law of cause and effect at work 
in the spiritual realm. 

"Love your enemies," said Jesus. Men have found 
that teaching the most difficult or the most visionary 
and impracticable, according to their viewpoint, of any- 
thing Jesus said. But was not Jesus revealing again the 
character of God? For the law of love is at work in our 
world and we see evidence of its working, evidence as 
impressive as of the law of gravitation. Men break the 
law of love but they do not break it with impunity. 
How much of the tears and the hunger of our world 
to-day is the result of wilful disregard of the law of 
love? 

The teaching of Jesus is shot through and through 
with the presence of God. It is no more possible to get 

45 



at his teaching apart from what He thought about God 
and his own relationship to God, than it is to draw an 
accurate picture of his deeds, without reckoning that 
relationship with the spiritual universe as the source of 
every one of them. 

Jesus' life and teachings, then, reveal the fact of God. 
Apart from that relationship, his magnificent life sim- 
ply evaporates. 

II. WHAT DID JESUS REVEAL ABOUT GOD? 

Our study so far will have prepared us for the dis- 
covery that Jesus did not offer any proof, in words, of 
the existence of God. Everything He was and did and 
said rests back upon this relationship with the Unseen. 
Moreover Jesus was dealing with devout Jews who did 
not question the existence of a Creator God, the Father 
of the Jewish nation, transcendent and majestic. This 
picture Jesus corrected and enlarged. He taught men 
how to think about God. "What is God like ?" we ask; 
for the answer to that question we may look with full 
assurance to Jesus, because He has given the most 
satisfactory answer ever formulated. 

God was Father for Jesus. It is almost a common- 
place to repeat those words but many of us will find 
ourselves confessing with Miriam Gray, "though I 
called Him Father, I really thought of Him as a lot of 
other things first — Schoolmaster, King, Lord Almighty, 
and so on. It never really got down into my mind that 
He was my Father." But that God was Father for 
Jesus so impressed itself upon the minds of the disciples 

46 



that they never could dissociate God from that rela- 
tionship in their thinking. Long after Jesus was gone 
from among them, and after they had come to know 
God as Father, for themselves, they continued to write 
of the a God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ," 
bearing testimony by means of that beautiful phrase to 
the intimate personal relationship which Jesus had with 
God. What this relationship meant we have discussed 
in the preceding section. It was genuine and central 
for Him, the source of his life. Perhaps we can best 
get at it by contrasting the partial and inadequate con- 
ceptions of God which Jesus' picture corrects. 

God was associated in Jesus' mind, primarily with 
life not with death. That is characteristic of Father- 
hood. As a boy of twelve years; when He was facing 
the problem of how to carry out his life's purpose; at the 
time of the temptation; in the thick of his active minis- 
try; at these times Jesus turned to the Father for help 
and guidance. To be sure, He faced the cross with his 
hand in the Father's hand. But He found God in the 
flood tide of life. He had learned to know Him as He 
stood on the threshold of opportunity and He turned to 
Him in strength as well as in weakness and in joy as 
well as in sorrow. 

We do not find this God who is a Father because we 
do not look for Him except at moments of distress or 
dire need. He is available at such times, like any true 
Father, but we never get really acquainted with Him 
until we recognize that a mere emergency contact with 
Him is not enough. As children, when nightfall came, 
we were taught to pray, 

47 



Now I lay me down to sleep, 
I pray the Lord my soul to keep. 
If I should die before I wake, 
I pray the Lord my soul to take. 

And we came to associate the thought of God with 
dying in the night. How much better to change that 
third line to "Glad and well may I awake," for most of 
us need God even more in our waking hours and in our 
well hours than in sleep or sickness, for we do most 
damage then. We need God in the successes and 
achievements of life as much as in the defeats and fail- 
ures, and we will never know Him as Father until we 
look for Him there, for it is characteristic of Father- 
hood to be tremendously interested in these triumphs of 
a son or daughter. That little Indian boy of whom it 
is told that, on the football field, as the ball rose from 
his foot in a strong straight punt, he was heard to ex- 
claim, "Parum, Yesuswami, parum!" which being in- 
terpreted, means, "Look, Lord Jesus, look!" had found 
the secret of knowing God as Father. 

God was a Friend to Jesus. There are people who 
get no satisfaction at all in thinking about God. They 
like to think about Jesus, but not about God. They 
seem to forget that to Jesus the Fatherhood of God was 
not some official relationship but a relation of friend- 
ship. Perhaps here, again, childhood teaching has 
wrought havoc with our thought of God. "Now, dollie, 
you be me and I'll be God, and I'll go away and not 
look at you for a whole hour," said a small girl. The 
God she knew was not in the remotest way a Friend. 

48 



He was a Celestial Detective, a Heavenly Policeman. 
Look again if you suspect that the God Jesus knew 
winked at sin and evil in the world. It was this same 
Jesus whose God was a Friend, who dealt wrong the 
hardest blows it ever received. But God to Him was 
never anything but a Friend, in whose presence evil 
slinks away and the good leaps up with joy. 

God was both Father and Friend to Jesus as He lived 
his life here in our world, on our planet. What you have 
been suggesting, I hear someone say, is all very beauti- 
ful and lovely, but this isn't that kind of world. You 
are thinking of a world of poetry and of sentiment. The 
idea of a Fatherly God won't do for this world. Hun- 
ger and want and strife and hate are here. "Every man 
for himself and the devil take the hindmost." The only 
attitude for a brave man to take is that of the "In- 
victus": 

Out of the night that covers me, 
Black as the pit from Pole to Pole, 

I thank whatever gods may be 
For my unconquerable soul. 

In the fell clutch of circumstance 

I will not wince nor cry aloud, 
Under the bludgeonings of chance 

My head is bloody, but unbowed. 

It matters not how strait the gate, 

How charged with punishments the scroll, 

I am the master of my fate; 
I am the captain of my soul! 

49 



And I answer, Yes, there is something fine and true about 
the "Invictus." I doubt not God heard that prayer, 
for prayer it is, though couched in the language of defi- 
ance. There is an element of victory in gritting one's 
teeth and clenching one's fists and standing the world. 
It is heroic to be able to face thus defiantly all that may 
come. 

But was it a world of poetry and sentiment in which 
Jesus found a Fatherly God? Was it all flowers and 
sunshine for Him? Is it true to say that He could be- 
lieve in such a God because He lived a soft and easy 
life? No, therein lies the deepest significance of his 
life for us. That is one reason why the cross is the key 
to the meaning of his life. All "the slings and arrows 
of outrageous fortune" were hurled at Him. His coun- 
trymen rejected Him, the church He loved put Him to 
death, his disciples misunderstood Him, one of them 
betrayed Him, and at the last He was crucified like the 
vilest criminal on a cross. His sensitive spirit bore the 
burden of the world's sin, He felt the weight of it as 
they should have felt it had their consciences been less 
blunt. He felt for an instant the separation from God 
which their action revealed, the most awful possibility 
which life holds, and He cried out "My God, my God, 
why hast thou forsaken me?" He took the "bludgeon- 
ings of chance" and yet one cannot think of Jesus as 
adopting the attitude of the "Invictus." It doesn't seem 
to fit Him to think of Him as clenching his fists and 
gritting his teeth and standing the world. Why? Be- 
cause He did not so much stand the world as He over- 

50 



came it. He conquered because He found a divine Ally, 
a Father. 

Jesus taught men who live in the midst of the realities 
of this world to say, Father. 

God was King for Jesus, that is to say, He was big 
enough for the universe. Just because Jesus knew God 
as Father we are not to think his thought of God was 
too small for us. He saw the folly of trying to think 
of God in terms of space, that is, in terms of bigness, 
and He led men to think of God in terms of his charac- 
ter. The importance of this we shall endeavor to under- 
stand in the next chapter. We need only to say here that 
when Jesus speaks of God as King, it is the Fatherli- 
ness of God which is really central in the picture. This 
comes to light in the famous parable of Matthew 25, 
sometimes called the parable of the Great Surprise. 
There the picture of God is that of a great King on his 
throne. Before Him are gathered all nations. It is a 
regal scene. Judgment is pronounced and the sheep are 
divided from the goats. Upon what basis does the King 
pronounce judgment? Have the goats failed to observe 
court etiquette? Have the sheep obsequiously and 
meticulously performed the last minutia of the royal 
ceremonial. No, it is the other way around. And yet 
the King thunders out to those on his left, "Depart from 
me!" What is the meaning of this strange decision, 
this Great Surprise? It is just that the King on that 
"throne of his glory" is a Father who cannot bear that 
the least of these shall be a stranger or thirsty or hun- 
gry or naked or in prison. Jesus said that a Father was 
seated on the throne of the universe. 

5i 



God was Truth and Right and Purity and Love for 
Jesus. But not abstract Truth or metaphysical Right- 
eousness or cold Purity or formulated Love. God was 
a Father, a Father of Truth and Right and Holiness 
and Love. How shall we describe what sort of Father 
God was to Jesus? The disciples found a way to put it, 
for they said, "Why God must be like Jesus!" 

III. THE DEITY OF CHRIST 

Christ is God! the followers of Jesus cried. And on 
their lips it was a great glad confession that at last they 
knew what God is like. Their portrait of God had been 
a vague, an uncertain, perhaps at times a terrible pic- 
ture, but now Christ filled the whole frame. Jesus is the 
truth about God! Through his life, his teaching, his 
death, his resurrection we see and know what God is 
like. In Jesus human personality is lifted up until it 
becomes a fit symbol for the divine life. How this came 
about theologians have been seeking to explain through 
all the centuries which followed. The first followers of 
Jesus simply accepted the fact of Christ as a glorious 
gift of God's love. To adapt a familiar phrase, these 
early Christians were willing to bet their lives that God 
is like Christ; that the love and the friendliness and the 
purity of Jesus are true of God; that the heart of the 
universe is a Christlike heart; that Jesus is the truth 
about God. 

This is not easier to confess than some credal formu- 
lation of how the two natures, the human and the 
divine, could have united in Jesus. It is harder. Men 
have found it possible to repeat such formulas with the 

52 



complete assent of their intellects, who did not find it 
possible to live as if God were the kind of God Jesus 
knew. The sorrow, the evil, the suffering, man's inhu- 
manity to man, the injustice which are so evident in our 
world make faith in the Father of Jesus Christ the most 
difficult venture in the world. And so we must think, 
next, of the experience of God and how it was that Jesus 
led his disciples not only to recognize and be convinced 
of God in his life but how to find and know Him in 
their own living. 

Is the main channel of our thought clear to this 
point? We have thought together of the men of the 
Old Testament who as they followed the pathways of 
their own best selves found God and found Him power- 
ful for the accomplishment of their ideals, imperfect 
and uncertain as those ideals often were. Then, we 
have just been thinking together of the most marvelous 
personality of history (to give Him no higher title) and 
of how his entire achievement He credited to a relation- 
ship with a God whom He defined by his own life and 
deeds as Father. Now we must ask — not as Philip did 
"Show us the Father"; for we have heard the answer of 
Jesus and have felt something of its force, "He that 
hath seen me hath seen the Father," — but now we must 
ask, "We have seen Him, may we know Him?" 



53 



(Chapter Jfaur 

©Ij? 1Exp?rtettr? of (&ah 



" T~ HAD revelled in pictures of all kinds, and I began 
with a particularly vivid imagination. So before 

-A- I started for Egypt I really did know the places 
I should pass and the country I was going to pretty well. 
I was quite sure of them. . . . One early morning I 
woke and the ship was still. I tumbled off my berth 
and turned to the port-hole. There rising up almost 
within the toss of a ship's biscuit was Gibraltar Rock, 
just as I had heard of it and seen it pictured a score of 
times; but heavens! it was REAL! I"* 

One reads the life story of Henry Drummond and 
studies his books and meditates upon the quality of that 
princely soul until one can almost see the figure George 
Adam Smith has drawn for us, "a graceful, well dressed 
gentleman, tall and lithe, with a swing in his walk and 
a brightness on his face, who seemed to carry no cares, 
and to know neither presumption nor timidity. You 
spoke and found him keen for any of a hundred inter- 
ests. He fished, he shot, he skated as few can, he played 
cricket; he would go any distance to see a fire or a foot- 
ball match. He had a new story, a new puzzle, or a new 
joke every time he met you. ... If you were alone with 
him, he was sure to find out what interested you and 
listen by the hour. The keen brown eyes got at your 
heart and you felt you could speak your best to them. 
... If the talk slipped among deeper things, he was 
as untroubled and as unforced as before; there was 
never a glimpse of a phylactery nor a smudge of unction 

* God is Everything, J. Alfred Sharp. London : The Epworth Press. 

57 



about his religion. He was one of the purest, most un- 
selfish, most reverent souls you ever knew, but you 
would not have called him a saint. The name he went 
by among younger men was 'The Prince'; there was a 
distinction and a radiance about him that compelled 
that title." Yes, we know about Henry Drummond, 
but our knowledge about him does not suffice. It whets 
our appetites for something more. It must have been 
vastly more satisfying to have actually had the experi- 
ence of meeting him face to face, to have experienced 
the Reality. 

Precisely this difference between knowledge about 
things and people and knowledge of them is the differ- 
ence between the Gospels and the Book of the Acts. 
For in the Book of the Acts the disciples of Jesus have 
come to know God, the Father, for themselves. He has 
become utterly real to them. How this came about in 
their lives and how it may come about in our own lives 
is worthy of our careful study. 

Jesus is not only the truth about God but He is the 
way to God. He said, "Follow me" and the way led 
from Judea through Samaria to Galilee and then by 
way of Berea back to Jerusalem. But it was likewise 
a pathway which led those disciples to a sense of the 
reality of God and to a knowledge of the kind of being 
God is, as we have seen in the preceding study. But 
Jesus also prepared them for this personal intimate ex- 
perience of God of which we are to think together. Of 
course we are not to think that knowledge about God 
and knowledge of God are two quite separate and dis- 
tinct experiences. It is simply that, for convenience' 

58 



sake and that we may get help for our own thinking, 
we stress the fact that while Jesus was with the disciples 
they gained a full and clear picture of God which was 
to lead later on to the deeper personal experience. As 
they lived with Jesus they shared his fellowship with 
the Father and all that they had previously been taught 
about God and all that they had experienced in their 
own hearts was made more real by his faith. But the 
Gospels show that these disciples were dependent upon 
their Master's physical presence for any confident and 
triumphant certainty about God. (Read Matthew 17: 
14-20.) They needed a knowledge of God which should 
be their own inner possession. How did they gain this 
experience? 

As has been already suggested, as we read the Book 
of the Acts we become conscious that the followers of 
Jesus and others who gathered about them had passed 
through a remarkable experience which is there set 
down as being "filled with the Holy Spirit." What is 
the meaning of this expression and may it have any 
meaning for us to-day ? The most remarkable account 
of this experience is to be found in the second chapter 
of Acts and at a later point we must give this chapter 
careful scrutiny. Here we need only to notice that no 
explanation is given. It is described as a gift from God, 
but it is worth noting that the gift was given to those 
who were ready to receive it and to those who were 
expecting it, and they were none other than the disci- 
ples of Jesus. This gives us a clue. We will recall his 
teaching and try to gather some hints as to the way in 

59 



which He prepared his disciples not only to know about 
God but also to know of God. 

I. "GOD IS SPIRIT" 

"Sir," replied the woman, "I see that you are a 
prophet. Our forefathers worshipped on this mountain, 
but you Jews say that the place where people must 
worship is in Jerusalem." 

"Believe me," said Jesus, "the time is coming when 
you will worship the Father neither on this mountain 
nor in Jerusalem. ... a time is coming — nay, has 
already come — when the true worshippers will worship 
the Father with true spiritual worship; for indeed the 
Father desires such worshippers. God is Spirit; and 
those who worship Him must bring Him true spiritual 
worship." John 4:19-24. (The Weymouth transla- 
tion.) 

The Weymouth translation brings out the point of 
Jesus' words as the usual versions do not. The Greek 
permits the words of Jesus to be translated either "God 
is a Spirit" or "God is Spirit" but the latter translation 
throws the emphasis where it belongs here and where 
Jesus was continually putting it in his teaching about 
God. 

Jesus opened the way for men to know God for them- 
selves by teaching them how to think about God. He 
taught them to think of God as Spirit. What did He 
mean by this? Of course He meant that we are not 
to think of God as a physical being, having hands and 
feet. That had no doubt proved helpful in the child- 
hood experience of the Hebrew race. Men who lived 

60 



in a world as small as theirs could afford to think of 
God as a big Superman. To think of Him in physical 
terms made Him near and real to them. In the same 
way we do not try, if we are wise, to begin the religious 
training of a little child by proving to him that his 
thought of God as a big man is all wrong. We empha- 
size instead the loving care of God so manifest in the 
world of nature which the little child can see. And if 
the child can be taught to recognize the goodness of 
God, he can make the transition from his "little world 
and sky" to the mighty system and dream of a the cos- 
mic rings round which the circling planets fly" without 
losing his God among the stars, for he has been taught 
to think of God in terms of goodness, not in terms of 
space. Precisely the same emphasis helped the "chil- 
dren" of Israel. They began, as the early chapters of 
Genesis show us, with a God who could walk in the 
Garden of Eden in the cool of the evening; who could 
question the man and the woman in that garden; who 
made garments for them when they were driven forth. 
In the earliest stories there is much of the Big Man 
about Him. Perhaps we of the Occident interpret these 
stories more literally than the writers of the Bible with 
their oriental love of imagery ever intended, but at any 
rate there was this tendency to think of a God with 
physical characteristics. But the great prophets did 
for their people just what the wise teacher to-day does 
for the child, they taught Israel to think of the charac- 
ter of God and thus they prepared them for bigger 
thinking about Him. 

When the exile came and the Jewish nation, de- 

61 



stroyed by Assyria and Babylon, existed largely in the 
little group of leaders (a small group surely in compari- 
son to the powerful nation which held them captive) 
who had been carried captive to Babylon, the wise 
teaching of the prophets bore good fruitage. Forced as 
they were to think of the world in larger terms than 
just little Palestine, they rejected completely the 
thought of God as a Big Man. That idea would no 
longer do for the larger world in which they found 
themselves. But because the prophets had taught them 
so well they did not lose their God in this transition 
into the wider world, they simply began to think of Him 
in larger terms. 

Is the experience of Israel true to the experience of 
the youth of to-day? Is he likewise forced by experi- 
ences, sometimes almost as bitter as the exile, to rethink 
his faith? At any rate Israel was compelled to think 
of God in bigger terms. Then it was that her prophets 
began to speak of the Spirit of Jehovah. But they were 
not yet thinking in the terms of Jesus although they 
used the word Spirit, for by the Spirit of Jehovah they 
mean a Representative or Messenger sent from Jeho- 
vah. We get the impression that they felt that God 
Himself was very far away from men but that He com- 
municated with them through his Spirit. But Jesus 
brought God very near to men. He said, God is Spirit, 
not, God has a Spirit. 

To think of God as having a Spirit or even as a Spirit 
is not helpful, for such ideas lead us to emphasize the 
"whereness" of God, or else to think of Him as a sort of 
ghost. If we are tempted to think of the "whereness" 

62 



of God we must either suppose Him to be "above the 
bright blue" or perhaps to think of Him as spread out 
so as to occupy all space like the ether. Neither of 
these ideas is religiously helpful. Jesus did not try 
to correct the thinking of his disciples on this point 
except as He turned their thoughts into other channels 
than such speculations. Or if Spirit means ghost to us 
as it does to many people we are tempted to think of 
God as a kind of ghost, visible to people who wear the 
right kind of religious spectacles. 

How sane and wholesome Jesus' teaching seems in 
contrast to ideas such as we have been suggesting. 
When Jesus told the woman at the well that "God is 
Spirit" He did not leave her speculating about where 
this Spirit was to be found. He told her to stop look- 
ing for God "on this mountain or in Jerusalem" or 
"above the bright blue" or in the interstices of the 
Milky Way or at the edges of the universe or any- 
where else. Nor did He suggest that she have her 
senses keen to detect some phantomlike ghost or some 
nucleus of energy. He told her that "those who wor- 
ship him must bring him true spiritual worship." And 
we have the key in our hand. Evidently what Jesus 
meant by spirit is something that we have ourselves for 
we can give God "true spiritual worship." Spirit is 
what we are, or at least what we may become. We have 
only to think of ourselves to know what spirit is. It is 
what we are more apt to call in our modern phrase 
"personality." Jesus was saying to the woman, God 
is Personality, the supreme Personality. He is, as a 
modern writer has put it, "a loving, intelligent will." 

63 



And He is to be found and worshipped through person- 
ality, that is to say, our thinking and feeling and willing. 
When someone says, "I don't know what you mean 
by the presence of God; I've never known God's pres- 
ence; do you mean some kind of feeling like an electric 
current that sets you tingling with emotion?", I an- 
swer, No, not that. The great mystics have known God 
in such ways as you speak of and their experiences have 
been incontrovertible evidence to them but not neces- 
sarily to others. You know, do you not, of the presence 
and guidance of your mother even when great distances 
separate you from her physically? I do not mean in 
any weird or ghostly way, but her will, her thought, and 
supremely her love for you, that is to say, her spirit or 
personality guides your life as your will and mind and 
emotions are shaped by her. It is not her body, that 
may be old and worn and quite insignificant, which 
molds your life but her personality, her spirit. Was 
not that, inadequately illustrated to be sure, what Jesus 
meant when he said to the woman at the well that "God 
is Spirit; and those who worship him must bring him 
true spiritual worship"? Oh, but you reply, "I have 
seen my mother and no man at any time has seen God." 
And I answer, The disciples had seen Jesus and they 
were willing to bet their lives that God was like Jesus, 
no doubt more wonderful than Jesus could reveal with 
the limitations of our humanity upon Him, but not less 
wonderful. These disciples believed that in Jesus they 
knew God's thought about things, and his will for them, 
and the love of his heart. They began to experience 
Him, to know Him for themselves, not by some ghostly 

64 



appearance but as they came to know his Spirit through 
Jesus. 

II. THE FORMATION OF A FELLOWSHIP 

Jesus prepared his disciples for a deeper knowledge 
of God, not only by teaching them how to think about 
Him, but also by the formation of a fellowship. The 
disciples were bound into a fellowship one with another 
and all with Jesus long before they got any clear under- 
standing of his teaching. Their intelligence was very 
uncertain and they were quite apt to say the wrong 
thing, especially Peter. But there are clear evidences 
that they loved Jesus and that the fellowship was an 
exceedingly powerful factor in their lives. Men do not 
eat and sleep and work together and make common 
friends and common foes and have common experiences 
to talk over without discovering that such a fellowship 
is one of the mightiest forces having to do with our 
lives, especially if it be formed about a leader like Jesus 
who had won them all by his charm and power, who 
shamed their selfish ambitions and divisive peculiarities 
by the grace of his personality. 

One or two illustrations will serve to show the effect 
of this fellowship upon the conduct of the disciples. 
Once after Jesus had given a hard saying, the Gospel 
of John records that "many of His disciples left Him 
and went away, and no longer associated with Him." 
Jesus therefore appealed to the Twelve. "Will you go 
also?" He asked. "Master," replied Simon Peter, "to 
whom shall we go?" John 6:66-68 (Weymouth). 
There is little reason to think that Peter and the others 

65 



understood what Jesus had been saying but the fellow- 
ship that had been formed was holding them together. 
The same thing happened at Caesarea Philippi a little 
later in the Gospel record. At that time Jesus asked the 
disciples "pointedly," as Weymouth translates it, "But 
you yourselves, who do you say that I am? You are 
the Christ, answered Peter." With what assurance 
Peter speaks! But we read a few verses further and 
discover that this same Peter does not understand at 
all what he has just been saying. It was Peter's heart 
speaking, his love for Jesus, loyalty to the group. And 
was it because the group broke up that the disciples 
proved so faint-hearted at the time of Jesus' crucifixion? 
Would Peter have been faced down by a servant girl, 
would he have denied that he knew anything about 
Jesus, if the others had been at his back ? At any rate 
it was when the old friends got together again and the 
fellowship re-formed that "they were all filled with the 
Holy Spirit." The opening words of the account cf 
what happened on the day of Pentecost are filled with 
meaning! "They were all together in one place." Acts 
2:1. 

It ought not to surprise us that "togetherness" was 
an important condition of this great experience of God 
which they shared. It is the one factor upon which we 
depend most to create any sort of spirit. Think of 
college spirit. What is it but "togetherness"? A com- 
mon loyalty, a common faith attitude, a common foe on 
the athletic field, and being "all together in one place" 
and we are filled with the college spirit. And the com- 
parison is not intended as irreverence. If we have been 

66 



interpreting Jesus aright He did not make any distinc- 
tion between, let us say, the nature of the family spirit 
and the Divine Spirit. Both involve a way of thinking, 
feeling and willing. We are shocked because we so 
rarely think of God as having anything to do with such 
things as athletics. Spirit is of the same nature in God 
and in us, Jesus taught, for He has made us in his image 
and has breathed into us the breath of life. The vast 
difference between us and God is the result of our un- 
holiness, the sin of our spirit, whereas God's Spirit is 
holy. As these disciples of Jesus gathered in the upper 
room on the day of Pentecost, they were bound together 
by ties of loyalty to Jesus whom many of them had 
known and loved, they had a common faith attitude, 
they had common foes; their thinking and feeling and 
willing was lifted to the plane of God's own life and 
"they were all filled with the Holy Spirit." 

Whatever binds men together in common loyalty and 
Christlike service tends to reproduce this experience 
which the disciples of Jesus had on the day of Pente- 
cost. The deepest religious experience which some of 
us ever expect to know came from the sense of fellow- 
ship in some such service as feeding the starving chil- 
dren of our late enemies in Central Europe. The task 
was a very practical one, involving a multitude of diffi- 
culties and not in the least sentimental, but one of the 
priceless by-products of such a piece of service was the 
quite extraordinary feeling of fellowship which de- 
veloped among those who undertook to do such a ser- 
vice in the spirit, as they believed, of Jesus of Nazareth. 
Who does not know of the sense of joy and power which 

67 



comes through fellowship in service however unpreten- 
tious it may be so long as it be performed in willing co- 
operation with others. Such fellowship heightens per- 
sonality, increases all our powers, gives us a sense of 
the abundant life and is in a measure at least like the 
tremendous experience at Pentecost. We no longer 
describe such experiences in the same language as that 
used by the New Testament writers. We do not think 
of the Holy Spirit as "impelling men as though by an 
external force. But it would make no difference to the 
reality of the experience if it proved natural to us to 
describe it in quite other terms, in terms derived not 
from the physical but from the psychical nature of 
man." ("The Spirit," page 155.) 

III. THE GIFT OF THE SPIRIT 

We have been trying to discover some of the ways 
which the disciples walked to the experience of God 
which came to them so richly on the day of Pentecost. 
We have discussed two of these pathways along which 
Jesus led them; the pathway of right thinking about 
God as Spirit who is to be found and known spiritually; 
and that pathway of fellowship with others who are 
seeking the same goal. Once more we need to remind 
ourselves that the early Christians did not seem to feel 
the need of any explanation of this most glorious experi- 
ence. The words in which they describe the event 
emphasize their sense of God's great goodness. The 
Spirit "came upon them," was "poured out," "shed 
forth," it "entered" into men. They seem not to have 
cared much about the explanation but to have been tre- 

68 



mendously occupied with the fact, which was that they 
had experienced God; that they knew Him now for 
themselves ; that this knowledge was no longer depend- 
ent upon the presence in their midst of their Master. 
They made use of a variety of terms to set forth this 
fact. The New Testament speaks of the "Spirit of 
God," "the Holy Spirit of God," "the Spirit of his Son," 
"the Spirit of Christ" and we speak of the Inner Christ 
and the Living Christ. All these phrases in so far as 
they relate to the Christian experience are but different 
ways of expressing the fact that God is working in their 
hearts for the accomplishment of the purposes which He 
revealed in Jesus of Nazareth. 

How the outlook of these disciples of Jesus had been 
broadened ! When Jesus called them to follow Him they 
were reverent Jews, strict monotheists, who thought of 
God as the Creator and the Divine Lawgiver. We can- 
not and need not say that they did not recognize God 
in the aspirations of their own hearts, but that was not 
the ruling idea they had of Him. As they lived with 
Jesus, they learned to see in Him the truth about God. 
God was a Father before He was a Judge or a King or 
a Lawgiver or a Schoolmaster and his Fatherhood gave 
new meaning to all their other ideas of Him. His laws 
had all been dictated by his love and his love was over 
all his laws. The laws were made for men and not men 
for the laws. They came to think of God as being like 
Christ. And then Jesus taught them to center their 
thought of God on his Love and his Will for them and 
his Thought or Plan for them and they began to think 
of God as Spirit. How their thought of God had been 

69 



enriched! And then Jesus died on the cross and the 
hope died out of their hearts, as the wonderful fellow- 
ship broke up. But after the resurrection came a new 
and sure conviction that Jesus really was the truth 
about God. The old fellowship was re-formed and en- 
larged and at Pentecost as they were all together in one 
place they were all filled with the Holy Spirit. And they 
began to speak of God as Father, and as Son, and as 
the Holy Spirit, not that they thought there were three 
Gods but that their thought of God had been enriched 
as they came to know Him through Jesus and what 
Jesus had taught them and finally through their own 
personal acquaintance with the Father. 

IV. THE RESULTS OF THE DAY OF PENTECOST 

The results of this profound experience were quickly 
apparent. First of all their emotions were aroused to a 
high pitch of excitement. They began to speak a with 
tongues." Exactly what happened we may not be able 
to tell at this distance. Twenty years later at Corinth 
the same thing was happening but Paul does not seem 
to reckon it as the most important result of the experi- 
ence of God. Indeed he calls upon the individual who 
feels overwhelmed by the religious emotions which rise 
up within him so that he makes strange noises to "pray 
that he may interpret" them for he "that speaketh in a 
tongue edifieth himself; but he that prophesieth edifieth 
the church." In other words Paul applies the test of 
social worth to any emotion. 

It is not strange that this fresh and real sense of the 
presence of God should have caused great excitement 

70 



and a flood tide of emotion. We all know something of 
such experiences. How good it is at some great con- 
ference under the influence of noble ideals and the 
appeal to Christlike service or at the rehearsal of Chris- 
tian achievement to sing together at the top of our 
voices some splendid Christian hymn ! But we need to 
remember Paul's counsel that we test our emotions as 
to their worth to other folk and as to their fruitage in 
service. 

A second result of this experience of God was a very- 
real deepening of the fellowship which already existed. 
An extraordinary sense of brotherhood developed. 
"And all that believed were together, and had all things 
common; and they sold their possessions and goods, 
and parted them to all according as any man had need." 
Acts 2:44, 45. "And the multitude of them that be- 
lieved were of one heart and soul: and not one of them 
said that aught of the things he possessed was his own; 
but they had all things common." Acts 4:32. Here 
was no economic or political theory. It was simply 
unreflecting, uncalculating brotherhood. Nobody re- 
quired anybody to do anything. They spontaneously 
expressed their sense of brotherhood in this way. The 
Holy Spirit evidently meant public-spiritedness. In the 
warmth of the moment, with this vivid sense of the 
Father's love and presence, not one of them thought of 
anything as "mine." 

Wherever and whenever men have experienced God 
the same thing has happened. A new sense of fellow- 
ship and social responsibility has appeared. Men have 
been forced to stop thinking about possessions as 

7i 



"mine" and have begun to think of them as "ours." It 
proved to be an economic impossibility to handle prop- 
erty in just the way that the brotherhood at Jerusalem 
handled it, but the splendid spirit back of that spon- 
taneous sharing of life has always and everywhere been 
characteristic of a genuine experience of God. 

A third result of this experience at Pentecost was 
that the fellowship was enlarged. There was nothing 
exclusive about it. It existed for the purpose of being 
enlarged. When the group gathered in the Upper Room 
on the day of Pentecost it was relatively small but be- 
fore the day was over they had shared their experience 
in such a convincing way that three thousand "souls" 
"were added unto them" and "the Lord added unto 
them day by day those that were being saved." The 
real crisis came, however, when the question arose as 
to whether race constituted a barrier to admission into 
the fellowship. There were many in that original 
group, as there have been many since their day, who 
could not see how men of an alien race could share this 
fellowship. But Paul saw it and gave his life to its 
fulfilment. 

A fourth result of this experience was that latent 
gifts were aroused. Personality blossomed forth in 
power and sweetness as men became convinced that 
God is interested in their affairs and is the sanction for 
the best they can produce. Heightened personality re- 
sulted from the experience of God so that men were 
healed of their diseases of body and mind and others be- 
came teachers and prophets and of service in a variety 
of ways. If God is Spirit, manifesting Himself in the 

72 



spirits of men should not a deeper knowledge of Him 
result in the training and development of every talent 
and gift which may be serviceable to mankind? 

But the abiding result of the experience of God was 
character. Outlasting emotion, surpassing intellectual 
understanding, more important than the discovery and 
enhancement of personal talent, growing out of the fel- 
lowship as its finest fruitage is Christlike character. 
"But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, long- 
suffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, meekness, 
self-control; against such there is no law." Galatians 
5:22-23. 

Why is it that all men do not gladly accept such a 
gift as the gift of the Spirit? Is God unwilling that all 
should know Him? What prevents the experience of 
God? Questions like these must be our next considera- 
tion. 



73 



(papier 3Fw 

^nmrttjmg Prong uritl} lis 



STEP backward, in imagination, for a century and 
a half, and then into the state of Connecticut and 
into the town of Enfield and finally into the vil- 
lage church. You will see a sight passing strange to 
modern eyes: the atmosphere of the church is tense 
with emotion; people are weeping and sobbing; some 
rise from their seats in their excitement and distress; 
the whole congregation is deeply moved. You seek for 
an explanation. It is not to be found in the manner of 
the preacher for he stands, calmly enough, with a candle 
in one hand and in the other a closely written manu- 
script from which he is reading his sermon. From time 
to time he pauses to quiet his hearers that he may go on 
with his discourse. It must be the matter not the man- 
ner which is creating such an impression. What is the 
theme of his sermon? "Sinners in the Hands of an 
Angry God." With what awful realism he pictures the 
tortures of the damned! No wonder his hearers clutch 
with tenacious grip the benches upon which they sit, lest 
they slide then and there into the horrible pit which the 
preacher pictures as prepared to receive them! Is the 
preacher mad? No, he is one of the most brilliant and 
learned men of his day, a scholar, a philosopher, a logi- 
cian, the illustrious Jonathan Edwards, ancestor of col- 
lege presidents and men of letters, a Jong line of them. 
And yet were Jonathan Edwards to rise up to-day and 
preach once more his famous sermon on "Sinners in the 
Hands of an Angry God" it would not create the same 
impression. His modern hearers would be amused, 

77 



some of them, or disgusted or horrified, but hardly con- 
vinced of the accuracy of his knowledge on the subject, 
and surely not swept by the fear which turned that 
Enfield congregation into panic-stricken sheep. 

But suppose we agree that the Puritan preachers of 
colonial days were not modest enough in their assump- 
tion of detailed knowledge about the future life, and 
suppose we agree that they needed to study once more 
what Jesus taught about God as Father, the main query 
yet remains, is it safer to sin to-day than in the days of 
Jonathan Edwards ? Is sin a less serious matter? And 
someone will add, What is sin, and how did it start, and 
how is it passed on and what can be done about it? 

We have been attempting in the last two chapters to 
outline what happened to the followers of Jesus, how 
they discovered the key to life, an organizing, centraliz- 
ing, constructive experience which made them bigger 
persons, releasing their latent powers, uniting them in a 
satisfying fellowship and producing the fruits of char- 
acter. If that kind of experience is available for all, 
why don't more people accept it and know it? If God 
is the kind of being Jesus said He was, why isn't that 
fact the most obvious thing in the world instead of 
being, as it is, a proposition that calls for faith? Why 
is faith so hard? These are all fair questions. 

The Bible very definitely deals with these questions 
and suggests two main reasons why it is hard to believe 
in a God who is Father. The first reason is because 
there is something wrong with us. And the second is 
because there is something wrong with the world. The 
world is in the process of being made and can be 

78 



changed, and we are in the process of becoming and can 
be likewise transformed. These two difficulties are 
really two, and not just different phases of one diffi- 
culty, as may at first thought seem to be the case, and 
we must treat them as separate and distinct problems. 

I. SOMETHING WRONG WITH US 

Jesus spent no time in speculation about or in defini- 
tion of this Something wrong," but by every act and 
word and by the contrast which his own white life made 
with the greys and blacks of the lives around Him He 
stressed the fact as no one else ever has that something 
is wrong with us. When challenged for associating with 
publicans and the unchurched, popularly called "sin- 
ners," He told the story of the prodigal son who had 
left his Father's house, and very clearly intimated that 
the elder son (the Pharisees and scribes who "mur- 
mured," Luke 15:2) was just as far away from the 
Father as his young brother, even though his body 
stayed at home. They were both lost. He told the 
stories of the lost coin and the lost sheep to illustrate 
the same situation. He didn't use the word "lost" in 
any technical sense, either, but in its simplest and most 
obvious meaning as the stories show. When He said 
lost, He meant just that; they were out of place. Under 
somewhat similar circumstances He said that they that 
are well have no need of a physician but they that are 
sick. He evidently found men who were diseased in 
more than body, and his dealings with, and attitude 
toward, the religious leaders of his day show that He 

79 



did not accept their estimate of their own spiritual 
health. Perhaps Jesus made few sweeping statements 
as to the extent of this lost and sick condition, but it is 
difficult to find many people then or to-day who do not 
seem to have "something wrong" with them when 
measured by his life. 

Jesus had a passion for wholeness and soundness of 
life. Sin as He defined it was anything short of that. 
It was being lost or being sick, or missing the mark. 
It was failure to rise to the full meaning and purpose 
of life. When the wayward boy "came to himself," he 
went home. 

How did sin originate? Jesus did not speculate about 
that question either. He seemed to feel that it was 
vastly more important to get the lost boy back home 
again than to explain why he went away in the first 
place. At the same time the story of the prodigal does 
hint at an explanation of the beginning of the trouble. 
The prodigal wanted to be something for himself. He 
felt that he could be freer away from home. He could 
develop his own life. He wanted to set up a life which 
moved about himself as a center instead of about his 
father. He wanted freedom and he thought it meant 
"cutting loose." 

Possibly this desire to swing our lives around the 
center of self is the root difficulty with all of us. If 
there is some great plan in the universe such as Jesus 
outlined, then a lot of little selves seeking their own 
ends will work havoc with that plan. And then free- 
dom means that steady obedience to the laws of our 
own natures which enables us to make use of all the 

80 



powers we have to their fullest extent. I see goldfish 
in a bowl and I think, "Poor goldfish! how cramped 
and circumscribed you are! What can I do for you? 
I know what I will do. I will set you free." And I take 
the goldfish, bowl and all, out into the middle of a great 
meadow and I gently remove them from the bowl and 
lay them on the meadow grass, saying, "Now you are 
free. Above you is the infinite blue of heaven. About 
you is this great meadow stretching as far as the eye 
can reach. You are free. Go where you please and do 
what you like." But the goldfish gasp and die. They 
are not free. They are just fish out of water. In the 
same way a perverted idea of freedom and the desire 
to swing round his own center brought the son, in 
Jesus' story, to the pigpen. And in the third chapter 
of the book of Genesis we read the same story, only this 
time this root evil, selfishness, and its concomitant, false 
freedom, drove the original pair out of paradise. 

Who is responsible? Here again Jesus did not theo- 
rize. He dealt with erring humanity so mercifully and 
with such a large understanding and sympathy, how- 
ever, that we know He saw all the way around the prob- 
lem. It seems clear that there are two ways at least 
in which sin is transmitted; one way through the race- 
connection, that is through the physical, mental and 
spiritual equipment which we inherit from our ances- 
tors; the other way through social forces which carry 
down through the centuries the burden of man's failures 
and of his positive wrongs so that each generation comes 
into an environment not of its own making but power- 
ful in its effect upon life. A terrible example of this 

81 



latter source of evil is the institution of war. To-day 
when probably nine-tenths of the peoples of the world 
would banish war forever from the earth, they find it 
next to impossible to end it, for it has worked its way 
into the fabric of society. War has become an institu- 
tion with hundreds of ramifications all sanctioned by 
the very organization of society. And so it is that each 
generation is not free to deal with the problem of inter- 
national relations unhampered by the decisions of the 
past. This is the reason why an evil like war needs but 
the least acquiescence to go on down the stream of time 
seemingly of its own momentum. It is a super-personal 
thing, that is, stronger than the persons who support it 
because it is a social institution. Is it any wonder that 
man has always felt that evil is mightier than just the 
persons who do evil things, and that he has sought to 
explain its power by a personal Evil One, or Satan, only 
less powerful than God Himself? He has always been 
correct in feeling the more than human power which 
evil gets to itself as it pollutes the streams of heredity 
and environment. Jesus taught that only a super- 
personal force could permanently thwart sin and evil 
in the world, and that is why He set at the forefront of 
his teaching, the kingdom of God, men so organized 
according to the will of God as to give righteousness 
right of way into the future. 

But Jesus emphasized a third source of sin in the 
world in the factor of personal choice. In fact this is 
the only source which He explicitly recognized. His 
sympathy and his mercy show that He knew how 
powerfully the forces of heredity and environment 

82 



affect us, and that He made large allowance for them. 
But, properly speaking, heredity and environment are 
sources of evil rather than sin. Sin, as we have denned 
it, is man's own failure to rise to the height of his best 
life. These other forces set the limits to our achieve- 
ment but Jesus recognized our own responsibility for 
achievement within those limits. Jesus never gave any 
support to the idea that man is simply a victim of cir- 
cumstances, with his life mapped out for him by his 
ancestors and society, a chip borne by conflicting cur- 
rents willy-nilly down the tide of destiny, for in spite 
of the compassion which He showed for the unfortunate 
and the outcast He called them one and all to join the 
kingdom and rise above the hindrances of their lives. 
He did not encourage men to wait until the arrival of 
the golden age before attempting to live the victorious 
life. He outlined the Sermon on the Mount, which is 
certainly the most daringly idealistic program of con- 
duct ever drawn up, to men with the heritage of average 
Jews behind them and to men living in the far from 
ideal environment of Palestine. 

A college student fresh from the study of genetics 
who had been thinking carefully and to some purpose 
once put the whole problem in a nutshell in this way: 
"When I saw a day laborer working on the street with a 
pick and a shovel, I used to believe that he might have 
been President if he had tried hard enough. Now I 
know that that was a childish idea. Very definite limits 
are set to our lives beyond which we cannot go. But 
none of us have got anywhere near our limits. " 

The seriousness of sin is not any less real than Jona- 

&3 



than Edwards pictured it. It is not safer to sin to-day 
than in the days of our fathers. Sin takes no smaller 
toll of human life and of honor and character and hap- 
piness than in other times. Our world is not rid of the 
hell of impurity and the hell of greed and the hell of 
hate. In fact the past few years have opened our eyes 
to see the awful consequences of sin as no imagined 
inferno could ever reveal it to us. The fruitage of sin 
is a sobering fact which we ought not to blink at. Just 
because we can no longer think of God as a sort of glori- 
fied police court judge assigning arbitrary punishments 
for sin, we are not released from the fact of punishment 
and from the fact of the cost of sin. As a matter of 
fact the punishment of sin, as the Bible records it, is not 
after the manner of the police court judge. You will 
remember that in an earlier chapter we pointed out how 
the sin of David bore its hidden fruitage in the charac- 
ter and conduct of his sons. Born and reared in the 
impure atmosphere of David's court their own lives 
showed the results. The prophet Jeremiah after he has 
been describing the sins of his people seems to search 
around in his own mind for a punishment adequate to 
such wrongdoing and finally he gives utterance to this 
illuminating sentence, "I will bring evil upon this peo- 
ple even the fruit of their thoughts." That sentence 
sums up the dominant idea of the Bible regarding the 
serious consequences of sin. It is a foregleam of Paul's 
teaching, " whatsoever a man soweth that shall he also 
reap." Jesus taught that sin had its genesis in the 
secret laboratory of the mind and that no more terrible 
punishment could possibly be devised than that our 

84 



thoughts should all of them come to fruition. Every 
daily newspaper with its sad story of crime and suffer- 
ing is just a record of the awful harvesting of thoughts 
which have borne their fruitage. Jesus was full of com- 
passion and understanding of the tempted and tried 
men and women whom He met but He never minimized 
the devastating consequences of sin nor ceased to call 
them to repentence. 

Sin's most serious consequence is the paralysis of 
character which it effects. It cripples personality. The 
missionary who told the Indians not to cultivate their 
corn on Sunday because if they did their corn would 
fail to grow made just the mistake which men are con- 
stantly making about the consequences of sin. The 
Indians took the missionary at his word, and laid out 
an acre of corn which they cultivated only on Sunday, 
giving it the most careful attention. Of course it grew 
and, as a result of the extraordinary care with which it 
was tended, produced more corn than any other acre. 
The whole order of nature could not be interrupted just 
to support the word of a misguided missionary. He 
made the mistake of telling the Indians to look for the 
results in the corn instead of in the men. 

It seems therefore that sin though defined as selfish- 
ness, as failure to rise to our own true selves, as the 
conscious choice of the lower when the higher is within 
our grasp, is none the less a terrible and enslaving fact 
with which we must deal. It is the fact which prevents 
our glad and full acceptance of the good news which 
Jesus brought to humanity about God. 

85 



II. JESUS AS SAVIOUR 

If Jesus were only revealer, revealer of an abundant 
life beyond our reach because something is funda- 
mentally wrong with us, He would be our despair not 
our hope. But Jesus is Saviour, or at least so myriads 
of men have claimed. What do they mean by speaking 
of Him thus ? How does He save men and how can He 
save us to this larger life? We need to be reminded 
as we approach this problem that Jesus' life was not 
chopped up into compartments such as Teacher, 
Leader, Saviour. He was a living, unified personality. 
All that we have said about his teaching and about his 
leadership is also true about his power as a deliverer 
from the "something wrong" with us. It is only that 
now we are to look at this life from the particular view- 
point which we have been discussing. Jesus was not 
just the "crystal Christ," spotless, perfect, aloof from 
the sinning and the sorrowing of humanity. He lived 
our life and did something tremendous for men to save 
them from their own selves. 

Jesus reveals man. He teaches us what to think 
about man as well as what to think about God. That 
He Himself lived a genuine human life is the most en- 
couraging thing that ever happened on this planet. 
When we are tempted to fix our gaze upon the greed, 
the hate, the weakness, the awful welter of sin and 
disease and strife which can be found in this, our world, 
if we look for it, and the roots of which we can discover 
in our own hearts, then we need to look at Jesus. The 
people who emphasize the truth that this is a poor lost 
world and that we are but miserable worms of the dust 

86 



have forgotten Jesus. He lived here and that makes a 
world of difference to anyone who sees the implications 
of it. Some of those implications are important to think 
about at this point. But first remember that his 
humanity was real. The earliest heresies consisted in 
denying, not that Jesus was genuinely divine, but that 
He was genuinely human. Men found it more difficult 
to believe in his humanity than in his divinity. Perhaps 
we find it harder, to-day, really to believe in his human- 
ity and act on the basis of it. Why did those early 
heretics deny his genuine humanity and say that his was 
only a "seeming humanity"? Because they could not 
believe that so wonderful a life could be lived by a real 
man. But Jesus was saturated in humanity. He was 
fondest of calling Himself Son of Man, and whatever 
the first meaning of that phrase may have been we are 
certainly right in saying that Jesus was the finest flower 
of the race of men. To confess the humanity of Jesus 
is to confess that He is the normal man. Then the 
cynic's "You can't change human nature" has its an- 
swer, for if Jesus of Nazareth shows us the possibilities 
of human nature, then it is enough for the best that we 
can hope or think, and within this human nature we 
have the possibility of sons of God. 

We need to come to grips with the reality of his life 
as it was lived out in Palestine. The more genuinely 
human that life, the more hope for humanity. Only 
we need to define humanity in terms of what men felt 
it to be when they met Jesus. Just as boys try to show 
their maturity by copying the weaknesses of manhood, 
so we are tempted to define humanity in terms of its 

87 



failures. We say of a great man, He was very human, 
and we proceed to mention his failings. But to confess 
the humanity of Jesus means that henceforth humanity 
takes on a new dignity in our eyes and we dare to define 
it in the terms of Jesus' life. 

Then think of the effect of his life upon others. 
Wherever Jesus came in contact with men, they began 
to see the possibility of a new selfhood for them. The 
best in every man leaped up in response to Jesus, and 
the lowest was shamed by Him. Men "came to them- 
selves" in his presence like the prodigal son in the far 
country. 

In his teaching the supremacy of personality is em- 
phatic. Jesus believed in men to the limit. He believed 
one man was worth more than a world full of things. 
"For what shall a man be profited if he gain the whole 
world and forfeit his life? or what shall a man give in 
exchange for his life?" In Luke's report of this saying 
he substitutes for life or soul the expression "his own 
self." Either reading is more pointed than the older 
translation, "soul," for soul has come to have a technical 
meaning with some folk and one has the uneasy feeling 
that it is possible for these people to be interested in 
your soul without caring anything about you as you. 
Jesus had a passion for people and He judged all insti- 
tutions with reference to their effect upon people. For 
instance, the disciples were impressed by the grandeur 
of the temple but Jesus was impressed by the graft which 
flourished within its walls and by which the poor were 
cheated by an unjust monopoly operating under the 
sanction and to the profit of the religious ring in control 



of the temple. The Pharisees were concerned about the 
length of prayers but Jesus was concerned about their 
treatment of widows and orphans. The religious leaders 
thought, apparently, that the Sabbath was so old and 
sacred an institution that it was made before man and 
that the Almighty made man in order to have somebody 
to observe this sacred day but Jesus said the Sabbath 
was made for man not man for the Sabbath. From 
beginning to end He made human personality supreme. 

We have thought of Jesus as the Truth about God 
and about Man. He got both those revelations down 
into the hearts of men by a great Act which has proved 
to be the mightiest force in reconstructing human life 
that humanity knows about. 

Jesus died on the cross. "And they were in the way, 
going up to Jerusalem, and Jesus was going on before 
them; and they began to wonder; and as they followed 
they began to fear. He is moving to Jerusalem with a 
purpose. They do not understand it. He is wrapped 
in thought; and as happens when a man's mind is work- 
ing strongly, his pace quickens, and they find them- 
selves at a distance behind him. And then something 
comes over them — a sense that there is something in the 
situation which they do not understand, a strangeness 
in the mind. They realize, in fact, that they are not 
so near to Jesus as they had supposed. And as they 
follow the wonder deepens into fear." In these words 
Mr. Glover is picturing what happened in the minds of 
the disciples as they walked behind Jesus on the way to 
Jerusalem. He has been telling them repeatedly that 
He goes to Jerusalem to face death. They have been 

89 



very intimate with Jesus. They have eaten and slept 
with Him. He has been constantly moving among 
them. They thought they knew Him. And then this 
happens, this something which they cannot fathom. 
What is it, the shadow of the cross? But Mr. Glover is 
not only revealing the workings of the minds of those 
first followers of Jesus, he is revealing what goes on in 
our own minds as we follow in the footsteps of Jesus. 
We think we know Him and then we stand in the pres- 
ence of the most amazing thing in human history: the 
love that gave Jesus to die! 

That He left Galilee where He had been popular and 
might easily have been honored and happy and went to 
Jerusalem to die; that He faced it all knowing what it 
meant; that He lived with Judas knowing what He 
would do; that He felt his kiss upon his cheek; that his 
heart knew the hazard of entrusting his cause to his 
disciples; that it was the church and the nation He 
loved that was to accomplish his death; all these cir- 
cumstances add to the courage which He reveals in sted- 
fastly setting his face to go to Jerusalem. But there is 
something more than that! Scores of men have faced 
death bravely without shrinking. Jesus shrank from it. 
Was He less courageous? No! the meaning of the 
cross lies not in physical courage or physical suffering 
or even in sacrifice. The meaning of the cross lies in 
the fact that Jesus was bearing our sins. The weight 
of the world's "something wrong" was heavy upon his 
heart: that mankind should reject Him; that his revela- 
tion of a Father of love and a life more abundant should 
be met with a cross. The marvel to us as we think of 

90 



those last days and hours of his life is that He seemed 
to forget Himself and identify Himself with the sinful 
men who were so callous and hard or so hypocritical. 
Perhaps this comes to clearest expression in those words 
uttered on the cross, "My God, my God, why hast thou 
forsaken me?" Had God forsaken Him? God was 
never nearer Jesus than just then. The whole meaning 
of the cross for us is wrapped up with the belief that 
God Himself was visible in every act and word of Jesus. 
God had not forsaken Him. But Jesus had so identified 
Himself with the very sinners who caused Him to be 
put to death that He felt that separation from the 
Father which they should have known had their hearts 
not been too hard. "He who lives more lives than one, 
more deaths than one must die," we read in the Ballad 
of Reading Gaol. From the day when Jesus went down 
into the muddy waters of the Jordan with the crowd 
who flocked to John the Baptist until his last hour on 
the cross He had lived Himself into the life of humanity 
as no one else ever has. And yet He shows us the 
Father. Is God like that ? Does He care as much for 
humanity as Jesus did ? Is He as saturated in humanity 
as Jesus was, glad with our joys and heavy with our 
sorrows, suffering as Jesus did because of our sins? 
Is the cross, not just one man beating his life out 
against the iron doors of fate, glorious but hopeless, but 
is it the Father showing Himself and his love and the 
agony which our sin brings to his own heart? If the 
cross means that, if for one brief moment we have seen 
clear into the Father's mind and heart, the world can 
never be the same again for us. If He hates sin like 

9i 



that, and if the cross is the measure of God's love, we 
must needs say with the prodigal, I will arise and go to 
my Father. 

The cross is not to be thought of as a "transaction," 
something enacted as on a stage many centuries ago on 
the basis of which, if we accept the stage performance, 
God will forgive us. The only meaning the death of 
Jesus can have for us is as it acts directly upon our 
own hearts, with a powerful upward "tug," making us 
abhor our sin and empowering us to nobler lives. Sacri- 
ficial love is the mightiest motive power for character 
in all the world of forces! In the cross of Jesus we 
meet sacrificial love in its supreme expression, tested to 
the last as perfect innocence is put to death by the 
accumulated forces of evil representing the very 
worst that we men can do! "Jesus' life helps me more 
than his death," students often say. "Well, it was the 
same love which saved men to higher things as Jesus 
lived among men. It was that love which got behind 
the armor of the sinful woman, and Zacchaeus, the rich 
publican, and scores of others. The cross was just the 
love of Jesus, and so the love of God, supremely tested 
and supremely triumphant. 

It is love which works the miracles of transforma- 
tion everywhere in life, in that measure of fullness with 
which it is applied. The settlement teacher may preach 
the beauties of cleanliness until her tongue cleave to the 
roof of her mouth without visible effect. But once let 
the miracle of love begin and toothbrushes become the 
rage. 

In July, 1920, a little group of relief workers largely 

92 



engaged in the service of feeding hungry children in 
Central Europe met in conference with citizens of our 
enemy countries. It was the day when the economic 
conference at Spa opened. In the pause which marked 
the beginning of the deliberations a former Baltic 
Baron, dispossessed of his estates by the Russian revo- 
lution, quietly remarked, "There are two important 
gatherings in Europe to-day: one at Spa and the other 
here. And of the two I consider this the more impor- 
tant. At Spa the diplomats are gathered with their 
proposals written on paper but you have come with 
your proposals written on your hearts." 

Jesus came with his proposals written on his heart, 
and as men came to know Him they had faith to ven- 
ture that they were God's own proposals and, ventur- 
ing, they were transformed from the men they had 
been into something like the measure of the stature of 
the fulness of Christ. 



93 



(Etjaptpr jg>ix 



WHEN Paul and Silas on their second mission- 
ary journey came into Macedonia, their first 
stop was at the city of Philippi. There they 
got into trouble through the conduct of a certain for- 
tune teller. This fortune teller, who was a source of 
profit to her managers, publicly declared that Paul and 
Silas were servants of the Most High God who pro- 
claimed the way of salvation. The account states that 
Paul was troubled by her repeated remarks about them 
and that he commanded the unclean spirit to come out 
of her, "and it came out that very hour." But since 
her masters had profited by the very difficulty of which 
she was now rid, they were greatly incensed at the act 
and dragged Paul and Silas before the magistrates. 
Their charge against the two was remote from their real 
grievance, which was scarcely an actionable offense. 
They appealed to the racial prejudices which seem to 
have been rife at Philippi. The Philippians desired to 
be known as one hundred per cent Romans, and so 
when they charged Paul and Silas with being Jewish 
propagandists, the magistrates in their eagerness to 
show their loyalty to Rome forgot Roman justice, 
stripped them of their clothing, and had them beaten 
and put in prison with their feet in the stocks. In this 
uncomfortable position Paul and Silas could not sleep 
and so they began to sing and pray, the prisoners listen- 
ing. Suddenly their prayer meeting was interrupted by 
an earthquake shock which shook the very foundations 
of the prison buildings. The prisoners' chains, probably 

97 



fastened to the wall, were loosened, and the doors were 
opened. The jailer, arriving on the scene and seeing 
that the doors were open, was upon the point of taking 
his own life for he knew the fate which awaited him if, 
as he supposed, the prisoners had escaped. He was 
about to do what would be considered the honorable 
thing in such a situation. Paul, either seeing through 
the doorway what the jailor intended or gathering his 
purpose from some exclamation, cried out, "Do thyself 
no harm; for we are all here." Whereupon the terrified 
jailer called for lights; went into the prison; found 
things as Paul had said; and fell down on his knees be- 
fore his two prisoners crying, "Sirs, what must I do to 
be saved? And they said, Believe on the Lord Jesus, 
and thou shalt be saved, thou and thy house. And they 
spake the word of the Lord unto him, with all that were 
in his house." (Acts 16:16-34.) 

Two sentences in this vivid story are so famous as to 
be almost classic: "Sirs, what must I do to be saved?" 
and "Believe on the Lord Jesus, and thou shalt be 
saved." What did the jailer mean by being "saved" 
and what did Paul mean by "believing on the Lord 
Jesus"? 

I. WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE "SAVED"? 

It is quite clear what the jailer meant by his question. 
He wanted relief and help in the perplexity of the im- 
mediate situation. He had no doubt passed through the 
most important crisis in his life. He was still in a state 
of great emotional excitement. The earthquake he 

98 



viewed with superstitious horror. But a moment before 
he had contemplated suicide. His little world was 
turned upside down. Put over against this agitated 
jailer Paul and Silas, calm, unperturbed, the masters 
of the situation! Salvation meant to him, then, al- 
though he did not put it into words, the quality of 
character which these strange men exhibited; their 
self-mastery, their fearlessness, their superiority over 
the incidents of life. And yet it was something more 
than stoicism; a Roman could understand stoicism. 
There was a triumphant joy about them which could 
not be quenched by beatings and inner prisons and 
stocks. They could sing in a situation like that! And 
their joy was not just an ecstasy which they hugged to 
themselves, seeking oblivion from the rough world by 
going into a sort of spiritual trance. They were clear- 
eyed men, quick and unselfish, decisive in action. They 
thought on the instant, not of themselves, but of the 
jailer who had put their feet in the stocks. "Do thyself 
no harm:" Paul sang out, "we are all here." No doubt 
the jailer had heard of the soothsaying maiden's words, 
"These men are servants of the Most High God, who 
proclaim unto you the way of salvation." Having wit- 
nessed an exhibition of salvation in terms which any- 
body could understand he said: I want some of that; 
"Sirs, what must I do to be saved?" 

Salvation throughout the New Testament is a quality 
of life which liberates men, releases them, saves them 
from the hampering, cramping, limiting facts of life here 
and hereafter. It is surprising to find how many differ- 
ent terms are used to describe it. The variety of terms 

99 



used shows the richness and reality of the experience 
which lies beneath. The word redemption came readily 
to the lips of men who were accustomed to the slave 
market and who felt that only so strong a term could 
adequately describe the deliverance from evil and from 
the slavery of sin which they had found. Reconcilia- 
tion described the experience for those who felt them- 
selves estranged from God. The word regeneration 
was natural to those who felt that the message of Christ 
had meant a new birth to them. Salvation expressed 
the sense of deliverance from shipwreck and disaster. 
But all this brings us back once more to the jailer's 
question, What must I do? We have been studying 
about this experience of God from many angles. Look 
back for a moment: the men of the Old Testament find- 
ing God through their own right purposes; Jesus reveal- 
ing Him as the Father; leading men to know Him as 
Spirit through the deepening fellowship which grew up 
around Him; and finally revealing a powerful motive 
for the reconstruction of human life. In the last chap- 
ter we have been thinking about that motive, God's 
love as manifest in Jesus. That, at the heart of the 
Universe, there is One who is like Jesus, — struggling 
to reshape broken and crooked humanity, suffering with 
and for us, hurt by our sin and happy in our goodness, 
— that is the mightiest motive for the conquest of sin 
which can be brought to bear upon our hearts. We have 
seen consequences of all this but there still remains the 
jailer's question, What must I do? Granted that Jesus 
is all and has done all that we have described, What 
must I do ? 



ioo 



II. WHAT MUST I DO? 

Instead of answering this question in the words which 
Paul used to the Philippian jailer we turn to the words 
of Jesus Himself. Beginning his public ministry, He 
used this call, "The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom 
of God is at hand: repent ye, and believe in the gospel." 
(Mark 1:15.) Three things stand out in this announce- 
ment: Jesus called men to set the kingdom of God as 
the goal of their living; He called them to reconstruct 
their lives according to that standard; and He called 
them to commit themselves utterly to belief in that 
kingdom. Think of these points in turn. 

An adequate goal. What is life all about? We some- 
times wonder. Disturb an ant hill, and what a scurry- 
ing hither and yon meets one's gaze. The ants seem 
to know what they are doing but to the human observer 
there is neither rhyme nor reason to their movements, 
unless he knows about the ways of ants. So are the 
ways of man. To the man from Mars, would our ways 
seem less chaotic, less insane than the ways of the ants? 
And we, do we know ourselves what life is all about? 
Profit, answers the merchant, and Production, the engi- 
neer. One after another we give our answers. 

Jesus gave the most adequate answer to that ques- 
tion. He set as the goal of our common life the bring- 
ing in through cooperation with God of his kingdom, 
and by the kingdom He meant "humanity organized 
according to the will of God," a state of affairs on this 
earth, a spiritual commonwealth of brotherly men ex- 
pressing God's beneficent will as they come into a reali- 
zation of their sonship to the Father. He meant by this 

101 



kingdom no vague, misty ideal floating around in the 
thin air of speculation but the practical though difficult 
endeavor of squaring political, social and economic 
life with the ultimate fact of a Father God and brother 
men. He did not forget the ambition of the individual 
and his unwillingness to be lost in a group, but He 
taught that only in a brotherly group is it possible for 
the individual to grow to his full stature; that service 
indeed is the pathway to preeminence; that life is never 
full and rich except in such a kingdom as He outlined. 
We cannot here discuss in detail what Jesus meant by 
this kingdom. He began by announcing that God has a 
plan for humanity and by calling men to adjust their 
lives to that plan, and we are never allowed to forget 
that what is demanded of the individual is in reference 
to this great plan. 

Repent ye. The Greek word means to "change one's 
mind." Jesus asked men to make such changes in their 
thinking about themselves and their relationship to 
their fellowmen as would conform with the kingdom 
which He was announcing. He called them to pro- 
nounce the same verdict upon life that He did. Re- 
pentance is something more, then, than sorrow or re- 
morse at the disasters that come upon one when he 
violates the laws of life. "A man repents when he 
begins to feel as Christ feels about evil in himself (and 
in society) and to act accordingly." It means that 
thoroughgoing renovation of the life which Christ's 
standards and his program for the kingdom demand. 
Thus understood it is something that must occur again 
and again as one fails to put into practice his plans. As 

102 



he returns to Christ's estimate of his life and the life 
around him, he will be forced again and again to 
"change his mind," to rethink with utter honesty the 
ways of his life. Such repentance is just the renewal of 
fellowship with Christ in his estimate of evil. 

Repentance has its social side as has been hinted at 
above. As a boy I used to wonder why my father con- 
cerned himself about the evils in our town, especially 
when he could, so far as I could see, do nothing to 
remedy them. Why not simply forget them? And yet 
they seemed to cut him to the quick, even when he was 
in no way directly responsible. He seemed to live a sort 
of public life, sensitive to the whole life of the com- 
munity. I thought it would have been better to forget 
the things that were outside his own particular work. 
How our estimates of parents change with the years! 
Mark Twain says that at seventeen he could scarcely 
endure his father, the old gentleman was so ignorant; 
at twenty he noticed that his father said a sensible thing 
occasionally; at twenty-five he was astonished at the 
improvement his father had made in the last eight years. 
My father's verdict upon the evils in our town was an 
evidence of a fellowship with Christ far deeper and 
richer than my own. He shared his Master's hatred 
of evil and bowed in penitence of spirit at everything 
that hindered the life of the kingdom in his community. 

As a man sees how and wherein he hinders by his life 
or words the realization of this new and better order 
which Jesus announced, he will repent. 

And believe. The disciple of Jesus is called upon to 
launch himself actively in faith. But what does faith 

103 



mean? No word has been more glibly used and no 
word has come to have more varied meanings than this 
word faith. Upon the lips of Jesus in his opening mes- 
sage it undoubtedly has as its content the belief that 
the kingdom which he has just announced is really at 
hand, this kingdom of the Father God who calls upon 
his sons to be brotherly men. In the incident of the 
jail delivery at Philippi the content of faith is somewhat 
differently stated: the jailer was told to "Believe on the 
Lord Jesus." And yet in effect they are the same, for 
belief in the imminence of such a kingdom as Jesus 
proclaimed called for belief of a thoroughgoing nature 
in the announcer of that kingdom. Perhaps we could 
include in one general statement what the content of 
faith is: that Jesus is the truth about God and man and 
the world. 

But what does faith mean? To describe the content 
of faith is not the same thing as denning the act of 
faith which we are challenged to make. We must think 
of some of the ways in which faith has been denned. 

i. Intellectual assent. Faith has often been thought 
of as giving intellectual assent to certain propositions 
presented to the mind. I believe thus and so, we com- 
monly say, meaning that we give intellectual assent to 
these things. Our minds respond with a Yes! 

2. "Going it blind!' Because faith is usually called 
for in realms where certain types of proof are impos- 
sible, faith has sometimes meant a going it blind," that 
is, accepting certain propositions which seem advan- 
tageous though contrary to reason, or as the small boy 
said, "Believing things you know aren't so." 

104 



3. Hope as to the juture. Faith often means hoped- 
for things which are so real as to furnish strength for 
present living. The epistle to the Hebrews presents 
faith under this aspect in the eleventh chapter and it 
comes to explicit definition in the first verse of the 
eleventh chapter. 

4. Trust in people or in processes. This is one of the 
commonest ways of presenting faith. We are forever 
acting upon faith in this sense of the word. 

"There is no unbelief; 
Whoever plants the seed beneath the sod 
And waits to see it push away the clod, 
He trusts in God. 

Whoever says when clouds are in the sky, 
'Be patient, heart, light breaketh by and by/ 
Trusts the Most High. 

Whoever sees 'neath winter's field of snow 
The silent harvest of the future grow, 
God's power must know. 

Whoever lies down on his couch to sleep, 
Content to lock each sense in slumber deep, 
Knows God will keep. 

Whoever says, 'Tomorrow,' 'the Unknown,' 
'The Future,' trusts the power alone 
He dares disown." 

5. A mystical experience. Faith to some of the great 
Christian mystics has been not so much intellectual or 

105 



hope or trust in something not as yet understood, as an 
inner personal experience of God of such intensity and 
reality as to be absolutely convincing to themselves. 

Of these five different ways of looking at faith Jesus 
by his teaching eliminates only the second. He specifi- 
cally told his disciples to "count the cost"; they were 
not to "go it blind." Action upon such a basis becomes 
mere credulity or else hypocrisy neither of which atti- 
tudes was countenanced by the Master. But there is 
an intellectual element in faith; it does involve confi- 
dent hope as regards the future; it means trust in God 
and the ways of God; and it does result often in the 
deepening of the emotional life. Faith is all this and 
something more. It is disciplined action on the basis 
of intellectual assent and hope and trust and confidence. 
Faith is not faith until it enlists the whole person, mind 
and heart and will. 

Jesus called his disciples to just such a full commit- 
ment of life. He said, "Follow me." In those two 
words all that we have been thinking about faith is 
involved: acceptance of Him with the whole personality 
and the will to live on the assumption that Jesus is the 
truth about God and man and the world. To change 
slightly Donald Hankey's well known phrase, Christian 
faith is betting your life that God is like Christ. 

In the story of the centurion who came to Jesus with 
the request that He heal his servant (Matt. 8:5-13) we 
have faith defined in action as well as in contemplation. 
This centurion had intellectual confidence; hope as to 
the outcome; entire trust in Jesus; and he was willing to 
venture on that basis. He was not afraid to put it to 

106 



the test. Jesus said of him, "Verily ... I have not 
found so great faith, no, not in Israel." 

Perhaps an illustration will help to clarify this way 
of thinking about faith. Stefanson, the Arctic explorer, 
in describing his own theory and practice of Arctic ex- 
ploration gives us an illuminating exposition of full- 
orbed faith. He tells us that he had long held as a 
theory that the accepted method of Arctic exploration 
was wrong. According to the orthodox theory, held by 
Nansen, Peary and every great Arctic explorer of 
modern times and by all the scientists without a single 
exception, the explorer must carry with him from his 
base food enough to last until he returns to that base. 
In the far north, they held, there is no life, or if there 
is any it is impossible to secure it for food. Stefanson 
believed that this theory was incorrect. He held that 
food was plentiful even in the extreme north, in the 
form of seals and polar bears; that Nansen and Peary 
and the rest had not seen these animals because, with 
sledges loaded with food, they had not had the eyes to 
see. Nor was it a mere guess with him. He reasoned 
that since the amount of plant life in a cubic foot of sea 
water is known to increase as the distance from the 
equator increases, and since the great fishing grounds 
are in the north, so there must be animal life in the far 
northern ocean to feed upon this plant life. So far, so 
good. His theory seems a perfectly safe one to hold so 
long as one stays in his study or his laboratory. Stefan- 
son's mind gave intellectual assent to it. Here was 
something more than mere credulity. And yet it was 

107 



not faith, in the sense in which we have been denning 
faith. 

Stefanson believed so strongly in his theory that he 
succeeded in persuading the Canadian government to 
fit out an expensive expedition for the purpose of trying 
it out. He advertised his theory, and selected his 
helpers on the basis of this theory and the expedition 
made its way to the northern seacoast of Alaska. He 
succeeded in enlisting the trust and confidence of others 
in the theory to the extent of making all preparations 
for the actual experiment. And yet it was not full- 
orbed faith as Stefanson very soon discovered. 

When at last he actually ventured to put out on the 
ice of the polar sea, with only half a dozen dogs and 
with supplies for only a few weeks, he discovered how 
much short of genuine faith was the attitude of most of 
his helpers. His second in command refused his co- 
operation on the ground that Stefanson was out of his 
mind. No sensible man, he insisted, would venture out 
on the treacherous, shifting polar ice which might carry 
him for hundreds of miles, without supplies enough 
for a long stay; no authority in polar exploration agreed 
with Stefanson; the Indians themselves, who had spent 
their lives in this land, believed that such an expedition 
was foolhardy; and Stefanson had only suggested it for 
the purpose of advertising his expedition, no one believ- 
ing that he would actually undertake to put his theory 
into practice. The majority of the men of the expedi- 
tion agreed with this viewpoint. 

Finally Stefanson secured two men to make the great 
hazard with him. The three of them went out on the 

1 08 



polar ice without food for dogs or men sufficient to last 
for more than a few weeks. They bet their lives that 
his theory was correct. They traveled a thousand miles 
on the polar ice and lived for several months on seal 
meat taken from the polar sea. That was Faith, mag- 
nificent Faith! It was not "going it blind" for they had 
the full consent of their intelligence. But they ventured 
beyond that which had been demonstrated, they were 
ready to go farther than experience warranted and 
verify afterwards. 

Jesus called for faith of just that type. Too much 
of what we call faith is no more than intellectual assent 
of the "safety first" variety. Jesus called men, then, 
as he calls men to-day to "bet their lives" that He is the 
Way and the Truth and the Life. Christian faith is not 
a vague, indefinite thing. It finds sharp and clear-cut 
definition in the life of Jesus. It's the will to live on 
the assumption that Jesus is the truth about things; 
that God is love in spite of all appearances; that men 
are of supreme value in spite of our prejudices and 
hatreds; that the kingdom of brotherly men ruled by a 
Father God is the supreme goal of all our life. 

What must I do? "The time is fulfilled and the king- 
dom of God is at hand: repent ye and believe in the 
gospel." This facing of sin in repentance and facing of 
God in faith, as the love of God manifested in Christ's 
whole life and supremely in his death upon the cross 
tugs at our hearts, theology terms Conversion. And he 
who undertakes it finds it will and must mean a "right 
about face" in his entire program of conduct and 
thought. 

109 



In the state of Nebraska there flows a curious river 
called the Platte. The natives say of it that it is a mile 
wide and an inch deep and that it has to be sprinkled 
in the summer time to keep it from blowing away. In 
places it has the appearance of a dozen streams rather 
than one, winding back and forth and intertwining 
among the sandbars. Now it ducks underground and 
flows for considerable distances and again it comes up 
and flows in its curious winding way. It is not a thing 
of beauty or of power. If a great central channel could 
be dug (an impossibility from an engineering viewpoint 
I suppose) and those meandering streams could be 
turned into that central channel the Platte might be- 
come a real river. 

The Platte river is an allegory of human life. Not 
one stream of influence but dozens course through our 
lives. There are underground passages as well and 
sandbars deflecting progress. We move forward not 
steadily and with singleness of purpose but with what 
twis tings and turnings and devious ways, not one 
motive but a mixture of motives producing each thought 
and act. If the forces of our lives could be organized, 
could be converted into a single central channel, our 
lives would become to humanity what noble rivers are 
to the countryside. Conversion is the deepening of a 
great central channel in our lives. 

III. THE NEW LIFE 

Centuries of Christian history bear witness to the 
fact that when that channel is dug, converting the little 

no 



wayward meandering currents of life into the central 
channel, the water pours through. It actually does! 

Years ago, in The Atlantic Monthly, there appeared 
the record of a personal experience called "Twenty 
Minutes of Reality." The writer had been imprisoned 
for many weeks within the four walls of a sick room. 
Then came convalescence and the day when for the first 
time she saw again the outside world. It was a dull day 
in early spring; above, a sky as grey as a pale face; all 
around, the browns of winter. But there came flooding 
into the consciousness of the convalescent a vivid joy in 
everything. People walking by in the street called out 
her unreasoning but boundless affection. Little English 
sparrows seemed to flit from place to place as though 
they were part of a divine symphony of life, The "un- 
endingness" of eternity which had made her shrink 
from the thought of the immortal life no longer troubled 
her, for if life was like this there could not conceivably 
be too much of it. And then the experience passed. 
Was it reality which she had experienced? Of course 
it was. She came to life freshly, with unwearied eyes, 
and found it good. 

Try looking at the sunset with your head upside 
down and note the new brilliance of the colors as you 
see them through the unwearied portion of the retina. 
The colors are even more brilliant than that if we could 
see them with undimmed eyes. Life as God sees it is 
better than we can imagine. We talk about looking at 
things as they really are and we mean looking at things 
as the average person sees them, not necessarily as they 
really are. "I never saw a sunset like that," was the 

in 



criticism of one who looked on a painting by Turner. 
" Ah, madam, but don't you wish you could?" came back 
the reply. "When she comes into the room," said a 
youth of his sweetheart, "it seems as though the room 
were filled with rose-colored light and the band were 
playing, 'God save the queen.' " But if this youth ever 
plumbed the possibilities of human companionship, he 
knows now that there are better things than even rose- 
colored light and orchestra music. Life is better than 
we dream if we have once seen God in the face of Jesus 
Christ and ventured to live our lives on the assurance 
that He is as Jesus reveals Him. Not that the black and 
ugly facts of life are not real but that like a great 
mystic of old, we have seen "an ocean of darkness and 
death" and then we have seen "an ocean of light" flow 
over "the ocean of darkness and death." 

Such an experience happened to Paul, He wrote, 
"If any man is in Christ, he is a new creature: the old 
things are passed away; behold, they are become new." 
A new world? no! a new Paul, a new attitude toward 
the world. Paul launched his life on the assumption 
that Jesus was the truth about God, and it made the 
world over for Him. This intense Jew became a world 
citizen! This zealot for legalism became a man who 
could write the most wonderful poem on love in all the 
literature of humanity (I Corinthians 13). He found 
like Stefanson that it's possible to live on the polar ice 
amid a thousand hardships and perplexities in comfort 
and security and even in great joy, because the facts 
of experience do really bear out the Christian faith. 

112 



IV. THE DOUBLE SEARCH 

A wee little girl once started out to find her father, 
and, as has happened times without number in the his- 
tory of families, she lost her way, for she was far too 
small to know the ways of the city where she lived. At 
length, home came the father and finding no little 
daughter awaiting him at the corner in the accustomed 
place and discovering that she was not anywhere about 
the house, he with the mother began to search the neigh- 
borhood for the lost little girl. It was a Sunday morn- 
ing and soon the worshippers from a near-by church, 
homeward bound, joined in the search, for it was a 
friendly community. On bicycle, by automobile and 
afoot scores of people were soon searching for one little 
girl. Presently she was found nearly a mile away from 
home. She had traveled in a great big circle. It was 
with difficulty that she was persuaded to turn back, for 
was she not going to find her father, and would she not 
find him at the next turning of the street? And she did 
find him, because he was seeking her. 

We live in a universe like that. We seek for the 
Father with stumbling footsteps and by devious ways, 
traveling it may be in circles. But at length we find 
Him not so much because we are seeking Him as be- 
cause He is seeking us. 

"If with all your hearts ye truly seek me, ye shall 
ever surely find me, thus saith your God." 



113 



Qlljajrtw §>mm 
(% Olfjurrfj 



THE first step in the fight for character is to 
ally yourself with the people and the influ- 
ences which are making toward the goal you 
have in view. The virtue of standing alone against a 
world of evil influences has been played up far too 
strongly in the moral and religious instruction of the 
past. There is something dramatic and fine about the 
great figures of history who have seemed to stand alone. 
We remember old general Joshua as he stood, a battle- 
scarred warrior, and delivered his ultimatum to the 
children of Israel: "And if it seem evil unto you to serve 
Jehovah, choose you this day whom ye will serve; 
whether the gods which your fathers served that were 
beyond the River, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose 
land ye dwell: but as for me and my house, we will 
serve Jehovah" The decision of character, the inde- 
pendence which finds expression in these noble words 
are tonic in quality. We remember Martin Luther at 
the Diet of Worms and Patrick Henry in his "Give me 
liberty or give me death" speech and all their stalwart 
predecessors and successors in the apostolic succession 
of resolute and fearless devotion to ideals whatever the 
cost and whatever the opposition. 

Dare to be a Daniel, 

Dare to stand alone, 

Dare to have a purpose true, 

Dare to make it known, 

was the version which our grandparents used. And we, 

117 



in our day, sing hymns of praise to the same quality of 
character, howbeit in somewhat different ways. We 
write and read books on how to strengthen the will. We 
train our salesmen in the gentle art of how to compel 
the wary customer to buy our goods. We picture cap- 
tains of industry of imposing personality and dominant 
will power who seem to have attained, or at least to 
maintain their force of character by the persistent use 
of certain brands of cigarettes. And then there are the 
extraordinary youths with outthrust jaws, who wear, 
incidentally, a certain make of collar. In our own way 
we pay tribute to the independence and decision of 
character which has always found a response in strong 
men and women. It takes a live fish, we say, to swim 
against the current. 

And yet I doubt the practicality of this teaching. It 
sounds well but will it work? We need to remember 
that the issues of life are only clear cut in the perspec- 
tive of history. At the time they were no doubt as 
cloudy and confused as the great issues of our own time 
seem to us. It seems very simple to make Joshua's 
choice or Martin Luther's or Patrick Henry's; there 
was only one side to choose; the issue was clear cut, a 
choice between good and evil, right and wrong. But 
was it so clear then? At any rate, the issues we have 
to meet are never like that. There always seem to be 
two sides to every problem. Are we sufficient unto our- 
selves in the matter of decision? 

And, then, isn't it a piece of unwarranted egotism 
to think that we can stand alone? Even the loneliest 
man in history will be found to be a member of some 

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great fellowship which sustains and strengthens him. 
In II Kings 6:8-23 there is a very revealing story about 
the prophet Elisha, the story of Elisha and the invad- 
ing Syrians. Israel, at the time of this incident, was in 
a sad state of weakness. The Syrians from the north 
invaded the country and pillaged it at will. The prophet 
Elisha had been very serviceable to the king of Israel, 
revealing the plans of the Syrians, discovering the am- 
bushes which they planned and generally making him- 
self useful. So often did Syrian plans go awry that the 
Syrian king suspected a traitor in his own ranks, but his 
followers told him that the prophet of the enemy, 
Elisha, was the real cause of his discomfiture. Straight- 
way the Syrian king laid his plans to catch this trouble- 
some prophet. Discovering that he was in Do than he 
threw a cordon of troops about the place by night. The 
rest of the story is best told in the words of the Bible: 
"And when the servant of the man of God was risen 
early, and gone forth, behold, a host with horses and 
chariots was round about the city. And his servant 
said unto him, Alas, my master! how shall we do? 
And he answered, Fear not; for they that are with us 
are more than they that are with them. And Elisha 
prayed, and said, Jehovah, I pray thee, open his eyes, 
that he may see. And Jehovah opened the eyes of the 
young man; and he saw: and, behold, the mountain was 
full of horses and chariots of fire round about Elisha." 
This story is usually applied as teaching that God looks 
after his own children; that the army of the Lord en- 
campeth round about them that fear Him and deliver- 
eth them; that the true child of God will be inviolable 

119 



and invulnerable; that he shall tread upon the lion and 
the adder; the young lion and the dragon shall he tram- 
ple under foot. If we try to apply such a teaching 
literally, we have yet to explain the whole host of mar- 
tyrs whom fire and sword devoured and Christ Himself 
who died on the cross. No, this is not the lesson. As a 
matter of fact, the horses and chariots of fire which 
filled the mountain round about Elisha were seen only 
by Elisha and then finally by the prophet's servant 
after his eyes had been opened. The invading host of 
the Syrians never did see them and they played no part 
in the events that followed save as they nerved Elisha 
and his young man to deal with their difficult situation. 
This incident gives us just a flash of insight into the 
source of this prophet's strength. "Fear not," he said, 
"for they that are with us are more than they that are 
with them." Whence this superb confidence? It was 
just one man, one simple prophet, who matched his wits 
and powers against the host of the Syrian king. And 
yet it was more than one man, for it was one man with 
God! 

But oftenest it is through human fellowship that men 
get strength. And when disaster comes it comes very 
often because we fail to use the human fellowship which 
is available. In one of the discouraging moments of his 
life the prophet Elijah prayed that he might die since 
he was the only true follower of Jehovah left in all 
Israel. But Elijah would have made a poor census offi- 
cial, for the angel assured him that there were still to 
be found, "seven thousand in Israel, all the knees which 
have not bowed to Baal." Jesus relied to the end upon 



120 



human fellowship. He chose twelve men that they 
might be with Him. He opened to them the program 
of his life. In the great crises of that life He sought 
help from them. Three of them He took with Him 
upon the Mountain of Transfiguration, and in Gethsem- 
ane the same three were chosen to share the awful 
experience. In both cases the disciples failed, but that 
Jesus took them with Him shows the reliance He placed 
upon the fellowship of his friends even though they 
could not fully understand what was happening in his 
own soul. 

No doubt if we but knew the whole circumstances 
surrounding every bold and independent action we 
should discover not one man alone, but one man nerved 
by a little group of faithful friends who believe in him 
and are ready to go with him all the way. Behind 
Joshua there was at least "my house"; behind Martin 
Luther at the Diet of Worms were faithful and power- 
ful princes; behind Patrick Henry were many brave 
and patriotic hearts; with Elisha there was the young 
man, his servant. Perhaps Jesus alone knew what lone- 
liness means, so far as human fellowship is concerned, 
and is therefore fit to be the captain of our salvation. 

"I suppose the boys who go wrong usually do so 
through low ideals," someone once remarked to the 
head of a great boys' school. "No," came the answer, 
"boys go wrong here as everywhere else because they 
get in with the wrong crowd." Human association is 
certainly one of the most powerful factors in the mak- 
ing of character. 

But there is yet another kind of fellowship which has 

121 



proved potent in the making of character, fellowship 
with good and true men and women who have lived 
before our time. A man's friends need not all be in the 
plane of the present. We need not deal with the diffi- 
cult problems of psychical research to discover that a 
very real companionship with mighty souls is possible. 
The beautiful phrase which the church has always used 
of this fact of experience and its influence upon present 
living is, "The Communion of Saints." On the Mount 
of Transfiguration when Peter and James and John, 
the three disciples who might have been expected to 
understand Jesus, failed Him, He communed with 
Moses and Elijah. He knew the power that is available 
from the consciousness that one stands in the line of the 
great souls of the past. The author of the Epistle to 
the Hebrews uses that appeal with tremendous effect in 
the eleventh chapter of his letter. He is writing to 
some little group of wavering Christians of the first 
century. They are few in number and weak in influ- 
ence and power. Perhaps they are laughed at and know 
the sting of social ostracism. What a picture He 
draws! He calls the roll of the nation's heroes, names 
calculated to arouse these wavering soldiers to the 
highest pitch of courageous endeavor. And then in the 
opening verses of the twelfth chapter He pictures a 
great arena, the scene of a contest. In the stands, 
rising tier on tier, are faith's heroes, spectators of the 
contest which is on in the arena. Who could not play 
the game with backers like that and a captain like 
Jesus ! 

122 



For all the saints who from their labors rest, 
Who thee by faith before the world confessed, 
Thy name, O Jesus, be forever blest: Alleluia! 

Thou wast their Rock, their Fortress, and their Might, 

Thou, Lord, their Captain in the well fought fight, 

Thou in the darkness drear their One True Light: Alleluia! 

O may thy soldiers, faithful, true and bold, 

Fight as the saints who nobly fought of old, 

And win with them, the victor's crown of gold: Alleluia! 

O blest communion, fellowship divine, 

We feebly struggle, they in glory shine; 

Yet all are one in Thee, for all are Thine: Alleluia! 

And when the strife is fierce, the warfare long, 

Steals on the ear the distant triumph song, 

And hearts are brave again, and arms are strong: Alleluia! 

The golden evening brightens in the west, 
Soon, soon to faithful warriors cometh rest, 
Sweet is the calm of Paradise the blest: Alleluia! 

From earth's wide bounds, from ocean's farthest coast, 
Through gates of pearl streams in the countless host, 
Singing to Father, Son, and Holy Ghost: Alleluia! 

I. THE IDEAL CHURCH 

The purpose of the church, as I understand it, is to 
throw about the individual these strengthening fellow- 
ships which we have been thinking about: the fellow- 
ship of other human beings who are seeking a like goal; 
the communion of the saints, that is to say, the fellow- 

123 



ship of those who have fought the good fight and have 
finished their course; and the supreme fellowship of 
God Himself, which is not to be thought of as entirely- 
separate and distinct from these fellowships, but is the 
consummation of them all. 

The beginning of the church of Christ is usually 
dated from the day of Pentecost, when the group of 
Jesus' disciples met in the upper room and were "all 
filled with the Holy Spirit." But we gather the true 
purpose and meaning of this fellowship from the asso- 
ciation of the twelve with Jesus. In the midst of the 
most popular period of Jesus' ministry, when crowds 
flocked to Him from all sides, He chose twelve men. 
Mark, with his usual conciseness reports it as follows: 
"He appointed twelve, that they might be with him, 
and that he might send them forth." There are three 
purposes, explicit or implied, in the simple statement, 
which are fundamental to the Christian Church. 

i. The central place of Christ. The church is an 
association of men about the central figure of Jesus, 
else we ought not to call it by his name. In this simple 
verse in Mark's Gospel, Jesus is not called by any high- 
sounding title, but He takes control of men's lives. It 
is rather an astounding assumption of authority that 
He should appoint twelve men, simply that they might 
"be with him." 

The one unifying factor in the long and intricate his- 
tory of the church is the central place of Christ. The 
church has never been able to agree in its definitions of 
What or Who Christ is, but only on the central place 
which He must hold. If there could file before us repre- 

124 



sentatives of every sect and group and denomination 
which has called itself Christian through all the cen- 
turies since Christ, what a motley throng it would be! 
There goes St. Simon Stylites, who lives on top of a pole 
withdrawn from the ways of men ; and there a crusader 
with his sword red with the blood of the Turk; and 
there Thomas a Kempis, counting each moment lost 
until he can return to his cell; and there Luther and 
Zwingli quarreling over whether it should be con- or 
transubstantiation; and there an evangelical with hymn 
book and Bible under his arm; and then the modern 
complexity of sect and denomination. Is there any- 
thing which these can have in common? One person- 
ality binds them together, Christ's; not theories about 
Christ, but Christ Himself, the fact of Christ. In the 
ideal church, Christ will be central. Perhaps we shall 
never be able to agree in our theories about Him ; but if 
He remains central for us, we shall be led into that 
knowledge and experience of God of which we have 
been thinking, and we shall under his guidance con- 
struct in cooperation with the Father that kingdom of 
brotherly men which was our Master's passion. 

2. Fellowship. Implicit in Mark's statement of the 
purpose of the choice of twelve men as disciples is the 
creation of a strengthening human fellowship, the germ 
of the kingdom of God. Just as the central place of 
Christ insures a knowledge of God and fellowship with 
Him, so the central place of Christ insures a whole- 
some human fellowship. The twelve men whom Jesus 
gathered about Him were not necessarily congenial. 
There were men in that group whose political back- 

125 



ground was such as to make them naturally hostile, one 
to another. Matthew had been a government official, 
a tax collector under Rome. In the same group was 
Simon, the Cananaean, that is to say, the "zealous one," 
a member of the party of Zealots, a revolutionary polit- 
ical group devoted to the overthrow of the Roman 
rule in Palestine by force of arms. These two men 
were not naturally congenial. Impetuous members of 
that group like Peter or the "sons of thunder," James 
and John, must have been most trying to the more 
phlegmatic temperaments. Here and there in the 
Gospel record are hints of friction. Yet a genuine fel- 
lowship did prevail, not because they were men of 
congenial tastes picked with a view to harmony, but 
because Jesus was their leader and because He called 
to a great constructive task that was calculated to lift 
each man to his highest level. 

The true church will be a brotherhood, a fellowship. 
Its membership will not be drawn from one social group 
but from every stratum of society. They will not be 
drawn together by like political views, but by a common 
loyalty to Jesus Christ. The church of Christ is pri- 
marily characterized by this extraordinary "love of the 
brethren" which is the fruit of the centrality of Christ 
and his program. Such love cannot be artificially 
created. It is impossible to get it by saying, "Go to, 
now, I will love my brother as myself," for it has to do 
with mind and heart and will — the whole personality — 
as it is ordered by Christ and his program for life. 
That it is more than a theory is evident from the con- 
trast which Jesus' life made with the lives of the reli- 

126 



gious leaders of his day. They knew the commandment 
which enjoined love for God with all one's being and 
one's neighbor as one's self and accepted it theoreti- 
cally without ever trying it out except in the clique to 
which they belonged. Love must begin at home and 
unless it is practicable as a law of relationships between 
people whose back yards are next to each other it is 
hardly to be supposed that it will be effective unto the 
ends of the earth. Sometimes it seems most difficult 
of application to those nearest us and in most intimate 
and constant contact with us. But Jesus meant some- 
thing more than cliquishness ! 

By love, Jesus meant something more potent than 
sentiment. He Himself did not react sentimentally to 
all people, although his love was unconquerable even 
by the most unlovely of men in their ugliest moments. 
His characterization of the Pharisees in the twenty- 
third chapter of Matthew, whether spoken in sorrow or 
in indignation, is hardly a piece of sentimentalism. It 
is a clear-eyed verdict passed upon their manner of life. 
He who tries to react emotionally to everyone whom he 
chances to meet will find either that he is simulating 
an affection which he does not genuinely feel, or that it 
is a hard, cold world in which the only principle which 
will work is "every man for himself and the devil take 
the hindmost." 

The fellowship which Jesus personified and practised 
in his relationships had its roots deeper down in per- 
sonality than the surface soil of passing moods and 
whims and emotions. It was rooted in the will, the will 
to do the Father's will and to live in his kingdom of 

127 



brotherly men here and now, whatever the difficulties. 
"Brotherhood/' someone has said, "is the will to include 
as many as possible in my own success and joy and hap- 
piness." It means a will to share life with all brother 
men because we are sons of a common Heavenly Father. 

3. Service. "... that he might send them forth." 
The final purpose of that splendid fellowship with Jesus 
and with one another was, Mark tells us, that the spirit 
and aims of Jesus might be carried forth into the world 
of men. That is the supreme task of the true church 
of Christ. As the church undertakes that task it is 
confronted with certain changing and temporary oppor- 
tunities and we must distinguish these from the con- 
stant and abiding task which is its supreme obligation 
and joy. 

4. The changing tasks of the church. Most of the 
institutions of our modern western civilization had their 
origin in the Christian church. The arts, music and 
sculpture and painting, were born within the doors of 
the church. The church gave them birth and nourished 
them until they grew to maturity. Perhaps it is true 
that the church narrowed their education, but at any 
rate the church was the patron of the arts. To-day the 
arts are separate from the life of the church. They 
have gone out the church door to live their own life. 
Similarly, education, legislative ideas, as we of the West 
know them, were within the church and have gone out 
to live a separate life entirely distinct from the church. 
We resent the idea of any control by the church of state 
or school. These and other institutions of our common 
life have offered opportunities for service for the church 

128 



in days gone by. The church has worked at these tasks 
sometimes well and sometimes poorly until the state or 
other organizations have taken them over. In our time 
the church has discovered, not for the first time, but 
afresh, the field of social service; the tremendous task 
of making over the social, industrial, economic life of 
society after the pattern of the teachings of Jesus. The 
institutional church has been created as an experiment 
station where these principles of Jesus may be applied 
to society in its complex relationships. Every body 
which calls itself by Christ's name has felt the influ- 
ence of this great social motive. But just as surely as 
the task of education has gone from the church, save 
as it remains the splendid responsibility of followers 
of Jesus to carry his spirit into the whole field of educa- 
tion and set the goals of education in conformity to his 
vision of the kingdom, so surely will the various con- 
crete problems of social reorganization move out from 
under the immediate eye of the church. As the church 
succeeds in giving the message of Jesus to society, 
society will take over one by one the specific tasks of 
social reconstruction. These are changing tasks. The 
church will always pioneer! She will be on the frontier 
of progress quick to see where and how the spirit of 
Jesus is to be carried into the concerns of human life. 
The abiding task of the church is the task of spiritual 
leadership. She ever gives Jesus, the truth about God 
and men, to be known. She calls men of whatever race 
or color, political or social conviction, to gather about 
Jesus and learn of Him. She calls men to Christ and 
his spirit. She thrusts them forth into the complexity 

129 



of modern life with whatever program they can accept 
as the best vehicle for carrying that spirit to the world. 
The church, as such, does not commit herself to capital- 
ism or socialism, to militarism or pacifism, or any other 
"ism." She commits herself to Christ and his spirit 
and she challenges men to carry that spirit by whatever 
means they honestly can into the problems of society. 
This is not to say that the church is to be indifferent to 
the relations of capital and labor, or to the problems of 
race, or to the tremendous questions of international 
relationships. But the deciding factor must be the 
spirit of Christ and its application to these problems. 
When the membership of the church as it thus seeks to 
know what his spirit is, is agreed upon certain attitudes 
as the clear expression of that spirit, it is for the church 
to move forward courageously in that direction. Per- 
haps it is at this point that the real contribution of 
separate branches of the church can be made. In the 
nature of the case, with the intricate problems of our 
society, men will differ widely even upon such points 
as the application of Christ's own teaching to life. The 
only practicable way for discovering whether any solu- 
tion is Christ's solution, is, perhaps, as men in various 
fellowships try out their convictions. And as for the 
individual members of any branch of Christ's church, 
they cannot be indifferent to the theories of government 
or of economic adjustment which are prevalent. They 
are summoned by the very spirit of their Master to 
accept or reject each proposal, and that right heartily, 
as it furthers or hinders the Kingdom of Christ. 
In the second century of our era, Pliny the Younger, 
130 



then Roman governor in Bithynia, a province of Asia 
Minor, wrote to his emperor asking advice as to the 
treatment of a certain group of people who were caus- 
ing him administrative difficulty. He said of these folk 
that they held to a base and immoderate superstition. 
They were accustomed to meet at daybreak to sing 
hymns and offer praises to Christ as king. They took 
an oath not to steal or lie or commit adultery or other- 
wise to break the moral law. And then they partook 
of a common meal. If Pliny the Younger had added 
that these strange people looked for the coming of a new 
Kingdom in which Christ should reign, he would have 
completed his picture of that early church. Worship, 
fellowship, service, because Christ is central and be- 
cause his Kingdom is the goal, — these have ever been 
the marks of the true Christian church. 

II. THE REAL CHURCH 

The church as we know it in our churches falls so far 
short of the ideal church of which we have just been 
speaking, that many are tempted to turn from it or to 
give it but half-hearted allegiance. We must think of 
some of its failures, even at the risk of discouragement, 
and see if these real weaknesses are enough to excuse 
us from supporting the church. 

i. Denominational rivalry. That there is not that 
unity and cohesion in the church of Christ which his 
leadership would presuppose is a sad fact. The strength 
of Christendom is divided and subdivided among great 
and small bodies each standing for some real or fancied 
principle to be discovered in his teaching. And yet this 

131 



divisiveness may be easily overdone in our thinking 
about the church. It has been said that the church is as 
well articulated as was the American Expeditionary 
Force in France. No doubt the A. E. F. would have 
been far more effective had it been better organized 
and more carefully articulated, yet no officer thought 
of abandoning the army because there was sometimes 
friction and lack of harmony among the different 
divisions. 

And then we will hardly get unity by letting all the 
churches die but one. That would be like administer- 
ing a dose of poison to every member of the football 
squad at the beginning of the season and selecting as the 
'varsity those eleven men who stood the poison best. 
Perhaps the weakest would be eliminated by that proc- 
ess but the eleven would not be in shape to meet the foe ! 
Men climbing a hill from opposite sides get together 
as they go up. If they try to find each other by going 
around the hill, they may both start in the same direc- 
tion and waste time and energy in following each other. 
In the same way the churches will get nearer each other 
as they climb, as they do the tasks given to them. 

The recognition of the great need of the world and 
the inadequacy of any one branch of Christ's church 
to meet that need alone, will promote essential unity 
of action as it is doing in our time. However mighty 
the church or any branch thereof, the need is mightier! 

2. "I can be a Christian without the church." With- 
out discussing whether that statement be true or false, 
it shows a total lack of understanding of the purpose 
of the church, and a narrowly individualistic attitude 

132 



in striking contrast to the "breadth" of outlook usually 
claimed by those who make this objection. Granted 
that it is possible for certain individuals to get spiritual 
food which nourishes their souls in other places than the 
church, the church is for the purpose of bringing in the 
Kingdom. Organized evil must be met by organized 
good. 

3. "/ don't find any church with which I exactly 
agree." Dr. Henry Sloane Coffin has answered this ob- 
jection by saying: "If you should find a church with 
which you agree, stay out of it. The church is too full 
of standpatters now." 

4. "I'm not good enough for the church." Jesus 
called men into discipleship and that means willingness 
to learn and to follow. It does not mean that one 
claims to know but that he wants to know; not that he 
claims to be good but that he wants to be good. The 
church is "not a graduate school for saints but a kin- 
dergarten for sinners." 

5. "I don't agree with the creeds of the churches." 
There are at least two things to be said in answer to this 
objection. First, that a great majority of the churches 
to-day will welcome into their fellowship anyone who can 
go as far as to accept the Lordship of Jesus Christ and 
pledge himself to his service in bringing in the kingdom. 
And if we have rightly interpreted the purpose of the 
church in the world, no one who cannot go that far will 
desire to have membership in it. Second, that we need 
great modesty in passing judgment upon the historic 
statements of faith which have come down to us out of 
the past. They call for the most careful thought and 

133 



appreciative study before we are ready either to accept 
or to reject them. 

6. "The church is conservative, socially, economi- 
cally, politically, in every way" True enough the 
church suffers from those evils which accompany long 
history, powerful organization, considerable wealth, 
expert and technical leadership. Yet the church still 
has the New Testament and that holds forth the promise 
of continual reformation because it gives Jesus to be 
known. Not even so solid and conservative an organi- 
zation as the church can withstand the eternal newness 
and freshness of life which springs from Christ and his 
teachings. The history of the church has been one 
breaking forth of this newness of life after another. 
No association of men can hope to escape the dangers 
of which we have been speaking, but the divine thing 
about the church is that she possesses in Jesus a revolu- 
tionary force which will continually break up the crys- 
tallization of custom and form, in thought and act. 

The church of Jesus' day had all of these weaknesses 
and more, yet Jesus kept step with it as long as He 
possibly could. It was in the synagogue school that He 
came in touch with the great prophets of the Old Testa- 
ment, who furnished Him with inspiration. He found 
it a channel for service, going "as his custom was" into 
the Nazareth synagogue. He seemed to hope to the 
end that He might win the church to the way of life 
which He came to offer. And He formed a new fellow- 
ship for the purpose of achieving what that Jewish 
church was meant, under God, to achieve for humanity. 

In his little book entitled "The College Course and 

134 



the Preparation for Life," Albert Parker Fitch has 
summarized effectively the claim which the church has 
upon the youth of to-day. 

"Did you ever see a boy who was born of poor par- 
ents, ignorant, hard-working folk, who had deformed 
their hands by toil, and turned their nights into day, 
to clothe him and feed him and warm him, and send him 
to school? And when he grew up strong and able be- 
cause of these advantages which they had lovingly and 
patiently gotten for him, they sent him to college and 
gave their love and their tears and their prayers, their 
time and effort and all their substance, for him and his 
advantage. They grew old and broken, and grey and 
bent, they were dull and uncouth and unlettered, not 
used to the polite and gracious ways of life, and yet they 
gave all they had to him and lost their lives in his. And 
he went through the graduate school and became, let 
us say, a polished and brilliant lawyer; he lived in a 
large world, in a dignified and formal and comfortable 
house, among well-mannered and sophisticated and 
highly intelligent people. And he forgot his old father 
and mother; he was rather ashamed of them anyway, 
for their lapses of language were intolerable, their views 
of the world absurd, and they didn't know how to dress. 
They were 'way behind the times.' ... He wished they 
were well out of the way. Did you ever see such a boy? 
What would you think of him? Well, the church is 
your mother, my friends. She is the venerable and 
patient mother of us all. She has transmitted the hope 
of the race, the belief in the indefectible worth and 
honor of human nature, the vision of the good and gra- 

135 



cious God. She saved, in her monasteries and churches, 
the remnants of the ancient learning in the awful wreck 
and break-up of great empires. She kept the torch of 
truth alight and made life tolerable and decent in the 
turbulent and decentralized days of feudalism. She 
sent her missionaries to our savage ancestors, who were 
offering their human sacrifices in the dark forests of 
Germany and Great Britain. She founded our schools 
and colleges, and created and organized our philan- 
thropies and herself sowed the seeds of democracy. Our 
country, our colleges, our homes, all the refuges of our 
life we owe to her. Out from her capacious life have 
these things issued. . . . And what shall we do, my 
brothers, we, who are her children, we, whom she has 
nourished and brought into the world, we, who owe our 
all to what she has been and done? Shall we rail at her, 
laugh at her, desert her, be ashamed of her ? Or shall 
we stand by her, as she has ever stood by our fathers 
and by us?" 



136 



adapter Eight 

prapr 



THE religious life is sustained not only by the 
strengthening fellowships which surround it 
but by the act of prayer. Prayer is closely 
connected with these fellowships of which we have 
been speaking; indeed it is at the heart of them, and 
yet it is so vital a part of the religious life that it 
demands special thought. 

Jesus prayed more than He talked about prayer. 
There are far more references to the fact of his prayer 
life than there are references to the manner of it or 
teachings about it. But its importance is to be ob- 
served in that his disciples asked Him to teach them to 
pray. They did not ask Him to teach them to heal or to 
preach. Is this evidence that they saw in his prayer 
life the source of his ministry of healing and teaching? 
His intimate fellowship with the Father was, by his own 
repeated statement, the source of all that He was and 
did, and his disciples did well to recognize prayer as the 
source of his power. 

Prayer has always had a place in religious exercises. 
No religious meeting is complete without it. But often 
its place is vague and unreal, a matter of "inherited 
propriety," the omission of which would shock us more 
than its presence thrills us. In and for the individual, 
prayer is either absolutely discarded, or sporadically 
present and only rarely a powerful factor in the daily 
life. 

But we return again and again to the problem of 
prayer because it was so central in the life of our Mas- 

139 



ter; because few are his followers who have not, at 
times at least, been aware of the resources of power 
available in prayer; and because now and again we 
meet men and women whose lives are made radiant and 
victorious by the fact of this act of conscious fellowship 
with God. I remember, in student days, meeting at 
noontime just after the last lecture of the morning and 
just before the luncheon hour with a little group of men 
called together by a certain Englishman who was study- 
ing among us. We would gather for perhaps five 
minutes in someone's room. And so well did we know 
one another that there was no embarrassment and 
restraint, and no putting of a prayer into words save as 
that prayer rose from the heart and clamored for utter- 
ance. Often we would spend those minutes in complete 
silence. And often when our brief time was up, the 
big Englishman would unfold his great length of body, 
for he was a giant in size, and standing at his full stat- 
ure with face absolutely illumined he would say with 
utter conviction, "That was great!" And then the rest 
of us knew that it behooved us to stand out from under 
if we would avoid a crashing slap on the back or some 
similar evidence of the rejuvenation of a spirit in con- 
trol of an active and powerful body. Prayer was so 
real in the life of that youth that it seemed to clear all 
the cobwebs from his brain and to act on his body like 
a cold shower. No skepticism could withstand the ob- 
vious fact that power from somewhere came pouring 
into his life as though "he had tapped a reservoir of 
energy." Who has not met such personalities? Who 

140 



has not asked himself, Is such an experience only for 
the religious genius? Is it at all possible for me? 

I. JESUS' TEACHING ABOUT PRAYER 

Jesus' teaching about prayer comes out of his teach- 
ing about God. As God is Father so prayer is the 
father-son relationship. These are commonplaces of 
religious instruction but often we have been too timid 
about carrying this relationship to its logical conse- 
quences. Is it really true that the relationship which 
exists between human parents and the child is at all 
analogous to the great Father of our spirits and his 
relationship with us and ours with Him? If it is true, 
and Jesus is authority for the helpfulness of the anal- 
ogy, then we may learn much about prayer from human 
relationships. 

Think of the baby! The baby prays for the moon. 
He stretches out his tiny hand for that shining delec- 
table object hanging in the sky. Astronomy means 
nothing to a baby. There is the moon in all its attrac- 
tiveness. Why can't he have it? What a fool a baby 
is to ask for the moon ! He doesn't get the moon. The 
whole order of the universe can scarcely be upset to 
please a baby. And even the fondest parents would 
hesitate to grant that prayer were it well within their 
power. But the baby gets something better, the loving 
care of the parents, a sense of relationship with them 
through the very asking for that impossible thing. 
Would it be desirable to try to produce a race of babies 
who would know better than to want the moon ? 

Or considering the growing child. What an animated 

141 



question mark he is! One interrogation after another 
in a never ending string. Question piled on top of ques- 
tion. Sometimes he hardly waits for one answer before 
propounding another puzzle lest the object of his bom- 
bardment should have rest from labor. He is more 
egoistic than any Sophomore. And when the question 
epidemic has somewhat abated comes the information 
stage. The parent is forced to listen to a broadside of 
information and misinformation delivered with the zest 
of the newly informed. Sometime we will train chil- 
dren not to ask questions and not to give unnecessary 
information and certainly not to ask for the things 
which we think any decent parent would give his child 
even without the asking. But would we want to? 

And then the youth! Who does not remember the 
tragic period of life when the expanding world dawns 
on one's view and he is not sufficient for it. What pain- 
ful readjustments! Do you remember when you had 
to have some particular thing which "everybody" else 
had or life would be absolutely ruined? Perhaps it was 
something to wear. I just remember a blue jersey with 
a close-fitting neck which was life's summum bonum 
for a week, at least, at one time. How eloquent I was 
in its praises. It was neat but not gaudy in appear- 
ance; an economy surely, for the close fitting neck 
obviated linen; and cheap at double the price. And 
who has not known in such momentous crises what it is 
to be called in by a father or a mother for a quiet talk, 
and to have unfolded before one the vision of a parent's 
plans for a son's success, until blue jerseys in all their 
splendor become unimportant in comparison with the 

142 



promise of the shining years and their possibilities as 
they beckon from the future. 

And finally manhood or womanhood! When the old 
cocksureness is gone, and the serious tasks of life are 
to do, one of the greatest joys in the world is to have a 
father or a mother to go to. Has some success come our 
way, we go to them to brag about it for we know that 
we can't lay it on thick enough to suit them and what- 
ever we may say they will be sure that we haven't quite 
done full justice to ourselves. Or is it defeat or sorrow, 
to whom else may we go with the same confident ex- 
pectation of receiving just the word of comfort or of 
wisdom we stand in want of? Or else a difficult prob- 
lem confronts us. Perhaps father or mother cannot 
solve it for us but there is strength in their presence. 

Jesus said our relation to God was meant to be a 
father-son relationship. How like babies we are, the 
wisest of us. Our ignorance, how infinite! His ways, 
past finding out. But it may be that his goodness and 
care is about us in our weakness as the mother's arms 
are about the smallest baby. And we are like children, 
asking God for those things which He will give us any- 
way, and offering information and misinformation 
about his universe in our prayers to Him. But would 
He have us stop asking for bread and stop asking for 
wisdom? Not if He is really Father as Jesus taught. 
For when we ask for bread we get more than bread, we 
get the Father's presence; our lives are consciously 
lifted into the relationship with Him which is our right- 
ful status. And we are like youths bringing our pas- 
sionate desires to the Father's greater wisdom, but like 

i43 



the youth we may also know what it means to have the 
Father open out before our gaze greater plans than we 
have dreamed of. And we are men and women facing 
life and its problems, who come to a Heavenly Father 
for the comfort and the wisdom which we so much need. 

II. HOW SHALL WE PRAY? 

The greatest text book on the subject of prayer is the 
book of the Psalms because it is prayer and worship 
and not just about these great themes. As one reads 
these moving hymns and prayers, he is conscious that 
they express at least three aspects or phases of the act 
of prayer: preparation for prayer; the central act itself; 
and the realization of God's presence. 

i. Preparation for prayer. The classic formulation 
of preparation for prayer is to be found in the Psalmist's 
words, "My soul wait thou in silence for God only, for 
my expectation is from Him." The positive and the 
negative sides of preparing for prayer are brought to 
clear expression in this verse. For most of us prayer 
is in the nature of a battle, at least at first. "Character 
is made by rejecting the irrelevant," it has been said. 
Surely prayer is made by rejecting the irrelevant. The 
host of trivial thoughts which crowd into our minds 
must be slain and that involves effort and concentra- 
tion. It is no easy thing to pray. It calls for concen- 
tration and the effort of the whole personality. "My 
soul wait thou in silence for God only," cried the Psalm- 
ist to his restless, hurried soul. Until we can do un- 
hurried thinking, we can scarcely expect to find God. 

144 



We are continually glorifying the next moment to the 
robbing of this present moment. Our minds are always 
in transit, moving from object to object. The rush and 
hurry of our lives is not so much a matter of bodily 
activity as of hurried, restless thinking; minds pulled 
hither and thither by a multitude of interests, never 
untroubled, never quiet. Jesus certainly did not coun- 
sel or practice the ascetic life. He lived in the full 
round of the activities which characterized his day. He 
knew what labor meant. He knew also the social obli- 
gations and opportunities, for He graced many a feast 
by his presence. He would not counsel withdrawal 
from the eager active life of youth. But it is possible 
to cultivate a quiet mind in the midst of whatever dis- 
tractions our circumstances may present. 

But the Psalmist is a better psychologist than to 
think that negative suggestion will prepare us for 
prayer. That would be like the historic advice to the 
children not to put beans up their noses. We don't rid 
ourselves of the trivial, superficial, irrelevant thoughts 
which hinder true worship by attending to them. We 
achieve the attitude and the atmosphere most conducive 
to genuine prayer only when a great positive purpose 
controls us. "For my expectation is from Him," wrote 
the Psalmist. He was able to still the clamorings of a 
hot and restless soul into silence because of a great 
expectancy. The little thoughts find no room in one's 
mind when he is expecting something big to happen. 
Self-satisfaction kills worship. A man who has no needs 
does not find God. But once let a great hunger for God 
and a large expectation of Him fill the heart of a man 

145 



and worship is real and living. I once climbed Mt. 
Pilatus on a swelteringly hot day; toiled all the way up 
the famous zigzag trail; reached what had seemed to 
be the summit, only to find that the real top was hun- 
dreds of feet farther up ; scrambled on all the way and 
then forgot fatigue and perspiration in the glories of the 
Bernese Alps stretching out to the horizon's rim, their 
glaciers dazzling in the brilliant sunshine, their famous 
peaks, the Monk, the Eiger and the Jungfrau, sharp 
and distinct against the skyline. It was expectancy of 
that panorama, more satisfying in reality than in antici- 
pation, which had pulled me up that long, hot, weary 
climb. Evidently the tourists who came up by the 
mountain railway had been expecting lunch, for when 
they reached the summit, they made a bee line for the 
Inn with only a passing glance at the scenery. 

In thinking of the pathways to a knowledge of God 
which the men of the Old Testament walked, in an 
earlier chapter, we discovered that they walked the 
way of wonder and found God at the end thereof; that 
they walked the way of their own best thought and right 
impulses and found God in that pathway. The Psalms 
are rich in suggestiveness as to the material available 
for meditation, material which leads us Godward. The 
writers of the Psalms saw God's hand in the history of 
their own people; they knew Him in the history of their 
own lives; they recognized his presence in the opera- 
tion of the moral law as men crashed down to failure 
and defeat through immorality or selfishness. 

In these same ways we will prepare for prayer. How 
many avenues of thought, how many problems and diffi- 

146 



culties personal and social, need to be lifted to the level 
of God's thought! 

2. The central act of prayer. What we have been 
thinking of is a vital part of worship, but worship is 
never complete until it goes one step further, until it 
results in the definite addressing of our personalities to 
God. "Prayer does not think or speak of God as Him, 
it addresses God as Thou." The writers of the Psalms 
were not content to bask in the sunshine of God's good- 
ness or to remember his mighty acts with gratitude. 
The central act of prayer and worship in the psalms is 
to be found in the vibrant phrases which are here and 
there and everywhere: "O God, thou art my God; 
earnestly will I seek thee"; "Have mercy upon me, O 
God, according to thy lovingkindness : according to 
the multitude of thy tender mercies blot out my trans- 
gressions." Help me, Forgive me, Lift me out of the 
pit, Transform me, Avenge me, — cries like these are at 
the heart of the psalms. Worship means, in its central 
act of prayer, a definite personal approach to God. It 
need not be in words, perhaps not even a conscious for- 
mulation of any request. We have referred to the 
requests, the petitions, of the psalmist because they are 
so prominent but prayer is not primarily petition, it is 
in its essence the bringing of our lives into direct and 
personal relationship with God. It may well be that 
such a relationship will more frequently mean com- 
munion than petition, but prayer does not become 
prayer until we move on beyond our thought of God as 
"Him" and address God as "Thou." 

3. The realization of God's presence. "I sought Je- 

147 



hovah, and He answered me, and delivered me from all 
my fears." It may be helpful to realize that the sense 
of the presence of God is not after all the central thing 
in prayer, at least an emotional sense of his presence. 
We have made a serious mistake in interpreting prayer 
as an emotional experience. Prayer is rather in its 
essence the bringing of our thought and will and emo- 
tional life to the plane of God's thought and will and 
heart as we know them through Jesus. As a matter of 
fact most men and women throughout the centuries who 
have prayed, have experienced the poise and the peace 
and the power of God's presence. The leaders of reli- 
gious movements in particular have often had most 
vivid and remarkable religious emotions. But there 
are a hundred factors which make or mar the emotional 
side of prayer. Physical weariness, faulty ventilation, 
disturbing noises, all these and countless other mechani- 
cal matters affect the "atmosphere" of the prayer life. 
We do well to attempt the most harmonious adjustment 
possible when we pray. But we need to rid ourselves 
of the notion that prayer is primarily dependent on the 
feelings. One of the finest Christians I have ever 
known insists that he knows nothing about the presence 
of God in this emotional or feeling sense. Yet he has 
the practice of prayer as a very real factor in his life. 
He regrets the poverty of his emotional life and longs 
for the uprush of feeling which others know. But he 
has rightly seen that this aspect of prayer, helpful and 
inspiring as it is, is not the sine qua non and because 
of his own lack he has been unusually helpful to many 
of a like temperament. His is no doubt an extreme 

148 



case but it helps us all to put the emphasis where it 
belongs in the prayer life. 

But to most people there is a realization of God's 
presence, at least at times, which brings home to them 
the meaning of the old words, "This poor man cried, 
and Jehovah heard him and saved him out of all his 
troubles." The literature of religious experience is 
filled with this consciousness of peace and joy which 
comes from prayer answered in the hearts of men. 

4. Where shall we put the emphasis in prayer? 
While prayer is the spontaneous expression of the per- 
sonality, lifted to the plane of the Father's life, yet 
it is helpful to think of the notes which sound out most 
clearly in the praying of Jesus and in the prayers of 
those whose lives have been fruitful and effective be- 
cause of their fellowship with God. 

Gratitude and thanksgiving are often the opening 
notes of helpful prayer. We key ourselves to the per- 
sonality of another by sympathetic understanding and 
appreciation. In like manner gratitude to the Heavenly 
Father lifts us at once into the realm where we can 
think his thoughts after Him. 

Reverence and, correspondingly, penitence tune us to 
God's life. The two belong together in our thought. 
We are lifted out of ourselves as we think of his purity 
and holiness. Yet He remains a Father for us if we 
are penitent, for penitence we have thought of as fel- 
lowship with the Father in his hatred of sin in us and in 
society. True prayer begins with consciousness of God, 
not self -consciousness. We look to Him in thanksgiv- 
ing, in reverence and in penitence. We are changed by 

149 



beholding Him, not by beholding ourselves, for self- 
consciousness is always weakness not strength. And 
sometimes people who pray much are difficult to live 
with. These folk become self-centered because their 
prayer life is not real prayer but a morbid self-con- 
sciousness. 

An active sense of fellowship with our fellowmen is 
characteristic of true prayer. God is the great Public 
Spirit of the universe and nobody can really have an 
experience of Him which is private. He may go into 
his closet and shut the door, but if he truly meet God 
there, he will be bound up with all his fellowmen the 
world around. A man may find God anywhere: in the 
heart of a jungle or on the crowded street; but once he 
finds Him, he has broken into the great fellowship of 
the Kingdom. So it was that Jesus taught his disciples 
to pray, Our Father, give us our daily bread. How 
many did He mean to include in those personal pro- 
nouns? How many do we include? 

Intercession characterized the prayer life of Jesus. 
He taught his disciples to pray, "Thy kingdom come." 
Apparently He believed that prayer could accomplish 
things outside our own lives. That prayer is efficacious 
to the one who prays seems more reasonable to many 
than that it should avail outside the sphere of our own 
personalities. Doubtless this result is most important 
in the forwarding of God's purposes. It remains true 
however that Jesus taught men to pray for the coming 
of the kingdom. He seemed to regard prayer as a force 
which God can use to accomplish things otherwise im- 
possible. We are not to think of prayer in this respect 

150 



as a force which we create but rather as a force which 
we can either release or dam up. Jesus seemed to imply 
that our personalities, put absolutely at the service of 
the Heavenly Father, may be powerful in forwarding 
his kingdom. How this may be we do not know. 

Imagination is necessary to a vital prayer life, not of 
course, the mere capacity for fancy, but imagination as 
a constructive force, the power which sees beyond the 
present to the fruition of the future. The children of 
Israel in the story of the siege of Jericho were com- 
manded to shout before the walls of that city fell. It is 
not a difficult thing to shout when once walls of diffi- 
culty have crumbled. The test of faith is to set up the 
shout of victory before there are any outward evidences 
of triumph. At the tomb of Lazarus Jesus prayed, 
"Father, I thank thee that thou hast heard me." But 
the cross was before Him; there were no outward evi- 
dences of answered prayer. He had heard the Father's 
voice in his own soul, the victory was won already in his 
inner life and there remained only the necessity of 
claiming it upon the fields of outer experience. Genuine 
prayer wins such victories in the inner life and claims 
them on the field of outer circumstances. 

Petition has its place in the prayer life but that place 
is last. When in thanksgiving and gratitude, conscious 
of our kinship to our brother men, seeking as the goal 
of our common effort the kingdom of God, winning the 
victories for that kingdom first in our own lives that we 
may claim them on the plains of history, then and then 
only are we ready to ask for the personal requests. And 
with such a prayer sequence as that, we will discover 

151 



when we come to ask for things for ourselves that some 
of our requests have already been answered and others 
are unseemly. But there will remain petitions that 
seem fitting in such a company. Such requests are to 
be made known with the frankness of the child in rela- 
tionship to a loving father whose wisdom is sufficient. 
Are we to pray for trivial things? Is God concerned 
with the small affairs of our lives? Is it undignified to 
bring to that fellowship the petty round of little things 
that make up our lives? The matters which we may 
properly bring to God in prayer cannot be set down in 
anybody's catalogue of legitimate prayers. What we 
pray for will depend upon our conception of the Father 
and our relationship to Him. Nothing is trivial which 
relates to his kingdom of brotherly men, and only those 
interests which do make for that kingdom have a right 
to be our interests. Life will not be narrowed by such 
a conception but rather broadened and made more pur- 
poseful, for everything which makes for the abundant 
life which Jesus manifested and came to propagate finds 
its proper place in the kingdom enterprise. 

5. Public worship in the great variety of forms which 
it takes in the various branches of Christ's Church is 
always rich in these aspects of worship of which we 
have been thinking. Each act of worship ought to be 
valued as it Prepares for the prayer, as it emphasizes 
the Central Act of prayer, as it increases our sense of 
the Realization of God's presence. And each act of 
worship is to be tested as it helps us to bring our lives 
definitely to God. As one sings some great hymn of the 
church used by successive generations, he may well be 

152 



conscious not only of the fellowship of those whose 
voices blend with his but also of the fellowship of all 
the great and the good whose voices in the past have 
been lifted in this same hymn of praise or of penitence 
or prayer for the advancement of the kingdom. There 
is effort and imagination demanded in the singing of a 
hymn as a true part of worship, as well as musical 
ability. When the scripture is read, the reading only 
becomes a genuinely worshipful act as the same effort 
is expended to join by the act of one's own imagination 
in the thanksgiving, in the program of service, in what- 
ever it may be which the words of scripture convey. 
When public prayer is offered, we profit only if our 
spirits actively participate in this part of the worship 
and make it our own. Public worship only reaches its 
climax for us if in hymn or prayer, in scripture reading 
or sermon, in silence or in responsive reading, in some 
exercise or other, we definitely bring our personalities 
to address God as "Thou." 

III. THE OTHER SIDE OF PRAYER 

In the story of Jacob's life as told in the book of 
Genesis the real crisis comes at the ford of the Jabbok 
when Jacob is returning from the land of his ancestors 
to the land of Canaan. Behind him is the pursuing 
Laban whom he has dealt with unscrupulously. Before 
him is Esau, his brother, whom he cheated out of the 
birthright. Jacob's extremity is God's opportunity, and 
the thirty-second chapter of Genesis records the result. 
"There wrestled a man with him until the breaking of 
the day." This classic story has been interpreted to 

153 



mean prevailing prayer. The wrestling Jacob and the 
praying Christian have become part of the accepted 
symbolism of religious thought. Here is portrayed, we 
are taught, that tenacity of spiritual endeavor which will 
not be content without the spiritual goods. And surely 
persistent search for God is not to be discountenanced. 
It has the highest authority. Jesus speaks of it again 
and again; the importunate widow; ask, seek, knock; 
"from the days of John the Baptist until now the king- 
dom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent take 
it by force." He wanted men who were in earnest about 
the kingdom. Not that God is to be thought of as reluc- 
tant but that Jesus is announcing a spiritual law by 
which God works. We live in a plastic universe. Noth- 
ing is surer than that prayer is answered. Oh, not the 
words that come all too glibly to our lips but the actual 
inner demands which we make upon the universe! Even 
the prayer of the self-righteous Pharisee was answered. 
His real prayer was that his righteousness might be 
seen of men. That prayer was answered. One of the 
most sarcastic words ever uttered by Jesus was the 
word He spoke of those same Pharisees, "They have 
received their reward." They had made out a very 
small demand upon the world and across their demand 
were written the words, Paid in full. The tragedy of 
prayer is not that prayer is unanswered but that being 
answered, most of our prayers are really for little 
selfish insignificant things. "He gave them their 
request but sent leanness into their soul." 

But the story of Jacob at the ford of the Jabbok does 
not say that Jacob wrestled with God but rather that 

154 



God wrestled with him, "and there wrestled a man with 
him." God was the initiator of that struggle. He was 
seeking an opportunity to come to grips with this de- 
vious patriarch and at the ford of the Jabbok He found 
that opportunity and laid hold of Jacob. This is the 
other side of prayer. "Behold, I stand at the door and 
knock: if any man hear my voice and open the door, I 
will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with 
me." It is not irrelevant to wonder if God be not say- 
ing, "I would that I might get those folk to listen to 
me," for the Bible is full of God's search for man, God's 
struggle with him, God's ceaseless, tireless effort to 
become articulate to humanity through humanity itself. 
The unpardonable sin is not to do this or that or the 
other outbreaking sin; the unpardonable sin is not to 
listen when the Great Spirit of the Almighty is knock- 
ing, and not to open the door to Him. 

Francis Thompson in his poem, "The Hound of 
Heaven," puts the other side of prayer. He pictures 
God's search for man, his tireless pursuit of man and 
man's effort to escape. 

I fled Him, down the nights and down the days; 

I fled Him, down the arches of the years; 
I fled Him, down the labyrinthean ways 

Of my own mind; and in the mist of tears 
I hid from Him, and under running laughter 
Up vistaed hopes, I sped ; 
And shot, precipitated, 
Adown Titanic glooms of chasmed fears, 

From those strong Feet that followed, followed after. 

155 



But with unhurrying chase, 

And unperturbed pace, 
Deliberate speed, majestic instancy, 

They beat — and a Voice beat 

More instant than the Feet — 
"All things betray thee, who betrayest Me." 

The poem goes on to instance the multitude of ways 
in which men seek to escape the pursuit of the Al- 
mighty. In "intertwining charities/' in fellowship with 
little children, in the delights of nature he seeks asylum, 
only to find that "Naught shelters thee, who wilt not 
shelter Me," and that "Fear wist not to evade as Love 
wist to pursue." 

At length he surrenders, unable to escape: 

Naked I wait thy love's uplifted stroke! 
And then come the words of the Divine Pursuer: 

"And is thy earth so marred, 

Shattered in shard on shard? 
Lo, all things fly thee, for thou fliest Me! 

Strange, piteous, futile thing! 
Wherefore should any set thee love apart? 
Seeing none but I makes much of naught (He said), 
And human love needs human meriting: 

How hast thou merited — 
Of all man's clotted clay the dingiest clot? 

Alack, thou knowest not 
How little worthy of any love thou art! 
Whom wilt thou find to love ignoble thee, 

Save Me, save only Me? 

156 



All which I took from thee I did but take, 

Not for thy harms, 
But just that thou might'st seek it in My arms. 

All which thy child's mistake 
Fancies as lost, I have stored for thee at home: 

Rise, clasp My hand, and come." 

And many centuries before the great singer of the He- 
brews knew the same wondrous truth: 

Whither shall I go from thy Spirit? 

Or whither shall I flee from thy presence? 

If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there: 

If I make my bed in Sheol, behold, thou art there. 

If I take the wings of the morning, 

And dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea ; 

Even there shall thy hand lead me, 

And thy right hand shall hold me. 



157 



ffitjapta: Nttu> 



®tl? (goal of £tfe 



EACH generation of Christians tends to clothe 
Jesus in the garments of its own idealism. To 
the monk of the Middle Ages he was the perfect 
ascetic; to the soldier he was a virile reformer with a 
scourge of small cords in his hand cleansing the temple 
of grafters and profiteers; to the scholar he was teacher 
and philosopher; to the revolutionary he was a "red" 
proclaiming everywhere that the "first shall be last and 
the last first"; to the artist he was the "crystal Christ" 
whose grace moved mankind more than his wisdom; to 
the weak and erring he was a friend of publicans and 
sinners. As one or the other of these facets of his char- 
acter has flashed upon our eyes we have been eager to 
see this beauty or that charm as the dominant charac- 
teristic of the Man of Galilee. He was in truth the har- 
monious presentation of virtues which seem contradic- 
tory in smaller personalities. It is not strange, then, 
that the generation which worships at the shrine of 
Virility should find him strong, or that the generation 
which retreats to monasteries to find Purity in separa- 
tion from the temptations of the world should imagine 
that his spotlessness was the fruit of the same sort of 
asceticism. Men wear spectacles colored by the ideals 
of their own day. The colored glass through which we 
look reveals his strength but not his tenderness, his 
purity but not his friendships with publicans and sin- 
ners, the grace and beauty but not the passion of his 
heart. We can never quite escape the personal equa- 
tion in our estimate of Him. 

161 



And yet nothing is surer than that Jesus was not just 
a strolling Oriental teacher who invited some peasants 
into genial fellowship with him and led them over the 
hills and through the dales of Judea and Galilee. "Oh, 
Galilee, blue Galilee, where Jesus loved so much to be," 
we sing. But Galilee was a lake where men caught fish 
for a living in Jesus' day. He asked four such men to 
give up their business and follow Him. He was not 
asking them to leave a day's pleasure to come on a 
tramp with Him. He was asking them to abandon a 
profitable commercial enterprise in which they were 
trained and successful operators in order to enter upon 
a field of larger usefulness and greater challenge. They 
responded. It is inconceivable that hard-headed Jewish 
business men should have left their occupations just 
because of the rather vague charm of Jesus' personality, 
for an indefinite and uncertain undertaking. He put 
before them a very definite task, so big, so challenging 
that they were thrilled from head to foot by the thought 
of it, and even a profitable business was as nothing in 
comparison with it. He set for them a goal. What 
was it? 

I. THE GOAL OF LIFE 

A twofold passion moved Jesus' life: the passion for 
people, individual persons whom He met, not mankind 
in the abstract, but in the concrete; and a passion for 
these individuals in their social relationships, that they 
should be "organized according to the will of God." 
Unless we succeed in seeing how these two passions 
were one in Jesus' life and how, as they become one in 

162 



our thought and endeavor, they afford the only ade- 
quate program for life, we shall have missed the con- 
summation of all our thinking about a working faith. 

First, then, the social goal which Jesus set before his 
disciples was summarized in a single phrase, familiar 
enough to their ears, but a phrase which, spoken with 
the ring of authority which resided in Him and spoken 
with a new note of nearness, set their hearts on fire: 
The kingdom of God. "The time is fully come and 
the kingdom of God is close at hand; repent and be- 
lieve this good news." 

The kingdom of God was not a new catchword. It 
stood for the highest hopes of the Hebrew people 
through centuries of their history, This is not the place 
to sketch the fascinating story of the development of 
this hope. Since David's glorious reign seers had not 
ceased to tell of a better day for Israel. Sometimes 
they painted their pictures, after the model of that era 
of material prosperity, in quite materialistic colors. 
The kingdom which was to be was characterized by 
the defeat of hostile powers, the annexation of territory, 
plenteous harvests, and peace and freedom as the 
accompaniments of the reign of Jehovah through his 
representatives. Sometimes the picture took quite a 
different coloring, with the spiritual predominant over 
the materialistic as the knowledge of Jehovah and the 
observance of his law was the animating force in the 
kingdom. Again the picture showed marvelous insight 
into the transforming power of sacrificial love as in the 
poems about the Suffering Servant in Isaiah. Now, the 
leader of this new day is mentioned. He is to be the 

163 



Anointed One, Messiah, "great David's greater son." 
Again, no leader save Jehovah is mentioned. There is 
the same variety and richness in the manner in which 
this better day is to be brought in. Sometimes the 
triumph of this kingdom seems to involve human 
armies facing a hostile world and defeating all enemies 
by the incredible valor of divinely aided warriors. 
Sometimes it is expected that God, Himself, will fight 
for his people without their aid or cooperation. The 
great prophets called for justice, mercy, truth and holi- 
ness as prerequisites for this better day. The Pharisees 
demanded meticulous observance of the law, written 
and oral. But everywhere and always the kingdom of 
God meant a better order of life for men on this earth. 
Even when it was thought of as dependent entirely for 
its coming upon the supernatural act of God, without 
the cooperation of men, it was still a state of affairs 
upon this earth. Like the vision of the new Jerusalem 
in the book of the Revelation, "coming down out of 
heaven from God," the kingdom of God was to be here 
among men and for men. The breadth or the narrow- 
ness, the racial exclusiveness or the wider sympathy, 
the crass materialism or the depth of spirituality, which 
characterized the many attempts to give a satisfactory 
description of this glorious age varied with the insight 
of the leaders of the people, but the divine thing about 
Hebrew history is that this superb hope of a better 
order of life for men here on this earth persisted. Some- 
times the flame almost went out, as materialism or cere- 
monialism smothered it, only to burn up again with 
gathering intensity at the voice of some fearless prophet 

164 



of righteousness or at the act of some courageous leader 
of a lost cause. When Jesus spoke that word, "The 
kingdom of God/' He spoke to the deepest and best in 
every man. 

Especially at that moment was Jesus' cry, "The king- 
dom is at hand," like a spark to tinder. A better order 
of life was sorely needed in little Palestine. Every sect 
and party save the Sadducees — who were top dogs as 
things were and so stood for the status quo — had its 
panacea. As a lad of twelve Jesus had heard men talk 
of the nation's needs and of the coming of the kingdom. 
"O God, that it might come now! " He must have heard 
them pray. He stayed in the temple court to hear such 
talk and even forgot the home-going folk in his passion- 
ate eagerness. He put questions that the wisest of the 
rabbis could not answer and at last, with the light of a 
divine purpose glowing on his face He said, "I must be 
about my Father's business." 

But something more than "talk" had happened. A 
strange man from the wilderness of Judea wearing out- 
landish clothing like some prophet of old had appeared 
announcing, "The kingdom is close at hand." His 
manner of saying it with the old prophetic ring in his 
voice stirred men from end to end of that little land. 
Could it be true? Tyranny at last defeated, the prin- 
ciple of blood and iron overthrown, self-determination 
for the Hebrews, revenge upon all enemies, the proud 
Jewish state resurrected? Thoughts like these surged 
up in many minds. Then one little word turned the 
tide of men's thinking. Like a rifle shot, like the crack 
of a whip lash and with something of its sting, John's 

165 



REPENT went home. Whatever the scope and power 
of the kingdom might be, the complete moral renova- 
tion of the individual was its prerequisite. 

Past traditions, present thinking, John the Baptist's 
sensational preaching, — influences like these were 
powerfully present in the mind of many a Palestinian 
in Jesus' day and He gathered them all together in his 
marvelous personality as He came proclaiming, a The 
time is fully come and the kingdom of God is close at 
hand; repent and believe this good news." 

The kingdom of God is absolutely central in Jesus' 
thought. His opening announcement was of the im- 
minence of the kingdom. The Sermon on the Mount is 
a description of the ideal citizen in the kingdom and his 
contact with the unideal conditions of our world. The 
parables by the sea are keyed to the kingdom, the nature 
of its growth, its supreme worth, its certain consumma- 
tion. The choice, the training and the sending forth of 
the disciples are with reference to the kingdom. Jesus' 
own service for the sick, the unfortunate, the outcast, is 
a practical demonstration of the way to bring that king- 
dom in. His teaching about God and prayer and the 
spiritual life is a revelation of the source of power for 
the kingdom task. The cross itself is the symbol of 
that self-forgetting love which is the very genius of the 
kingdom. More than a hundred times in the first three 
Gospels is this phrase kingdom of God or kingdom of 
Heaven used. Jesus set the kingdom before his follow- 
ers as the organizing goal of their lives. It was as they 
put the kingdom first that they would learn how to 
value all else in life. A single anxiety was to be theirs, 

166 



not anxiety about money or food or clothes but "Seek 
ye first his kingdom, and his righteousness; and all 
these things shall be added unto you." 

II. WHAT DID JESUS MEAN BY THE KINGDOM? 

Jesus did not define the kingdom in a single compact 
definition. He was more given to exhibiting a way of 
life than to defining it. Moreover the kingdom already 
meant something definite to his hearers who looked for 
a kingdom of God which should take the place of the 
kingdom of Rome. They differed widely as to how and 
when this kingdom should come but they were at one, 
as we have already suggested, in the belief that it meant 
a definite and improved order of life for them on this 
earth. Jesus gave more time to the revision of their 
thought of the kingdom than to a formal statement of 
his own. He was constructive not destructive in his 
teaching method. He began where John left off and 
by deed and word began to give a deeper content to 
their familiar thought of the kingdom. 

It is certain that He meant as they meant by the 
kingdom of God "a better order of life for men on this 
earth." What that order of life was to be, who were to 
share in it, whether it was to be limited to this earth, 
how it was to be brought into fuller being, how and 
when it is to be consummated, — upon all these ques- 
tions men have differed widely in their interpretations 
of his teaching. Perhaps the best definition of the king- 
dom is that of Professor Rauschenbusch because it does 
not beg the question and affords a basis of unity for all 
shades of opinion, "humanity organized according to 

167 



the will of God." If we are willing to make God as 
Jesus revealed Him the center of all our thinking about 
the kingdom we will have a constructive approach to 
this difficult problem. Throughout this little book we 
have been seeking to know the "God and Father of our 
Lord Jesus Christ." Jesus proclaimed a kingdom in 
which this God should be supreme and his will the cen- 
tral factor in the relationships of men. With such a 
starting point we can ask each question more wisely. 
Who will be eligible for such a kingdom? Think back 
to our discussion in chapter six, "What must I do?" 
How do men enter the kingdom? Think back over our 
discussion in chapters two to five. What will member- 
ship in the kingdom mean in terms of daily living? 
Read again our discussion of the experience of God and 
its results in the lives of those first Christians in chapter 
four. Everything we have been trying to say about the 
way of life which Jesus revealed is an attempt to de- 
scribe the kingdom. This criterion must be applied to 
the wider relationships of life. Men have dealings with 
each other not alone as individuals but also as they are 
organized into institutions. It is the application of the 
will of God to humanity in these group relationships 
which is the supreme task of our day. A discussion of 
the intricate and baffling problems of industry, of inter- 
racial and international relationships does not come 
within the scope of our study. But the same principle 
must be applied if the kingdom is actually to come 
among men. For, however it comes, it will mean, if it 
be the kingdom Jesus proclaimed, the reign of the 
Father in all these realms of human relationships. 

168 



Perhaps every follower of Jesus can agree to this 
minimum statement of his teaching of the kingdom: A 
better order of life for men upon this earth as they con- 
form to the will of the God who is revealed in Jesus. 
But the purpose of this chapter is not so much a de- 
tailed discussion of what Jesus meant by the kingdom 
as a consideration of that kingdom, thought of as the 
goal of our common living. If the kingdom of God as 
Jesus proclaimed it is to be accepted as the goal of life, 
then we cannot avoid asking two other questions : How 
is this kingdom to be established and what are the 
chances of ultimate success? 

III. HOW AND WHEN WILL THE KINGDOM COME? 

Christians have never been able to agree upon any 
one answer to this question. It would be presumptuous 
to think that our attempt to answer it can be any more 
satisfactory. But if we can arrive at an attitude, a 
spirit in harmony with the spirit of Jesus, we will have 
done something far more important than the formulat- 
ing of a correct intellectual viewpoint. First let us 
think of the various answers which have been given, 
holding as close as may be to the statement of these 
answers in terms of their effect upon the practical busi- 
ness of living. 

a. The kingdom of God will come by slow growth as 
the spirit of Jesus transforms individual hearts and as 
the regenerated individual regenerates society. We 
may look forward to a long, slow process. The passages 
in the Gospels which seem to make Jesus predict a sud- 
den coming of the kingdom out of the heavens are either 

169 



not his own words but the current expectations of the 
Jews, or else they have been misunderstood, first by his 
immediate disciples whose minds were filled with hopes 
of a material kingdom, and then by his later disciples in 
all ages as they have faced discouraging conditions in 
an evil world which seems to give little promise of be- 
coming the "kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ." 
This form of the kingdom hope has flourished in good 
times and faded in bad times. Before the war men 
thought the world was getting better fast. Progress 
was steady, slow sometimes, to be sure, but certain, 
nevertheless. Humanity was going uphill, sometimes 
on foot, again on a bicycle, and occasionally with the 
speed of a high-powered motor, according as one saw 
the facts of our world. The kingdom of God was 
actually coming into our life. Then came the war and 
men abandoned hope. How foolish to think that this 
world could ever be saved ? It was by nature evil and 
rotten to the core! Men might be saved but not 
society! Society was a sinking ship, and salvation 
meant saving men out of the world and not saving a 
world which was doomed from the beginning of time. 
Thus men forgot that all the forces of evil which showed 
themselves in the war were present and active on the 
day before war was declared, and that the war itself 
was only a great lifting of the veil, a revelation of the 
task awaiting the followers of Jesus in cooperation with 
the Father. And men forgot the great surging tide of 
idealism which was also unveiled by the world tragedy. 
No doubt our folly in thinking that progress is sure and 
steady apart from people who do progress was abun- 

170 



dantly revealed by the great war, but was the Master's 
confidence in humanity "even the least of these" mis- 
placed? Jesus never gave any basis for the idea that 
humanity is moving steadily and mechanically upward 
like some great escalator upon which one need only 
step to be carried to the top. He called men to effort. 
The kingdom as he preached it was a strenuous en- 
deavor in fellowship with God Himself who works at 
our side. "My Father worketh hitherto, and I work." 

b. The kingdom of God will come suddenly by an 
act of God Himself. At length Christ will return, not 
in the hearts of men but in outward visible splendor. 
The world will be remade by Divine Compulsion. The 
time for tolerance and love toward erring humanity will 
be ended. The familiar details of this conception of 
the kingdom need not be repeated. It is held in two 
widely different ways, as well as with a multitude of 
minor variations. 

First, there are those who believe that Jesus expected 
the consummation of the kingdom to come through an 
act of God either during his own lifetime or with his 
death. Their verdict is simply that Jesus was mis- 
taken in this expectation. He shared the world-view 
of his own time. But his teaching is not invalidated by 
that fact. His conception of how the kingdom was to 
come and when was but the shell in which the marvel- 
ous kernel of his thought was contained. What does it 
matter, they tell us, if Jesus did not hold the modern 
scientific and philosophical viewpoint as to the future 
of this earth; He did something vastly more important 
than that, He described a kind of life which is the goal 

171 



of all good men from that day to this. More than that 
He lived it here on earth and He inspired other men 
to live it. He opened up for us men the possibility of 
fellowship with God as the sanction and the inspiration 
of our best endeavor. His death on the cross does free 
men from sin as they feel the tug of the sacrificial love 
which gave Jesus to die and as they have faith to believe 
that God Himself is best seen in and through that same 
cross. We must make our own peace with science and 
philosophy not blinking at the facts which they present. 
We will ask the astronomer to tell us about the chances 
for our little earth in the vast universe. We will ask 
Jesus to tell us how to live with our fellows and with 
God. We will seek to bring in that kingdom which was 
the passion of his heart even though we cannot any 
longer count on a spectacular advent. We will have 
faith in its final consummation! 

Second, there are those who believe that Jesus ex- 
pected the kingdom to come by act of God but who be- 
lieve that He was not mistaken but misunderstood. The 
disciples were wrong in thinking that this kingdom was 
to come at once. It is still so to come. A thousand 
years is but as a day in the sight of the Lord. Those 
who hold this view still scan the heavens for signs of his 
appearing. They believe that the time is always short- 
ened, always too brief for the great task of winning 
men for Christ. To prepare men for this coming king- 
dom which shall be ushered in is the great enterprise. 
Only as social reform or international adjustment defi- 
nitely prepares the way for individual soul-winning has 
it any place in the Christian's program, for society as 

172 



we know it is doomed and the nations of the earth 
are likewise doomed. The kingdom will swing low, and 
all those who know Christ will step aboard and the rest 
will be utterly and irretrievably lost. 

IV. WHAT SHALL OUR ATTITUDE BE? 

No one will be ready to give a final answer as to his 
own position in this important matter without a careful 
study of the teachings of Jesus. Perhaps few of us are 
prepared to make that study for ourselves. We have 
to depend upon others. But we can arrive at an atti- 
tude which shall be our own. We can test each proposal 
in the light of certain values which need to be conserved. 

i. We must hold no thought of the kingdom and its 
coming which will not square with Jesus' revelation of 
God as Father. The God Jesus revealed could never be 
a sort of Omnipotent Kaiser enforcing his rule among 
men by other means than those which are in complete 
harmony with his nature. Jesus knew a God whose 
reign was ever the reign of love, who sought to win men 
by the mighty reasonableness of unseen yet powerful 
forces. His justice and his truth are the justice and 
truth of a Father. Nor must we forget that He is 
always Spirit. It is so easy to think of God in terms 
of the Big Man when we think about the coming of the 
kingdom but if it is the God of Jesus of whom we are 
thinking and his kingdom which we pray for, then there 
must ever be harmony between our conception of his 
rule and the earthly life of Jesus which exhibited that 
rule in all completeness. 

173 



2. We must hold no thought of the kingdom which 
will make us slackers in carrying out here on earth the 
program which Jesus exemplified in himself and en- 
joined upon his disciples. It is very possible to be so 
zealous for the souls of men as to forget that Jesus gave 
Himself in almost ceaseless effort for men's bodies, 
healing their diseases, feeding the hungry, opening 
blinded eyes, and in every way bringing physical life up 
to the normal. He recognized that "man shall not live 
by bread alone" but He told of a good Samaritan who 
illustrated neighborliness by ministering to a needy 
man without once questioning his race or once seeking 
to make Him into a Samaritan, who simply showed un- 
calculating love in action. That such love incarnated 
in practical service is the most powerful propaganda 
imaginable for the Christian way of life is neither here 
nor there to the disciple of Jesus. He manifests such a 
spirit, working for every good cause, enlisting under 
the banner of every righteous reform, seeking every 
peaceful adjustment of economic, social, racial and in- 
ternational difficulties, not because He expects by any 
given program to save a certain quota of souls from the 
shipwreck of society, but simply because, having caught 
the spirit of Jesus He cannot keep from such causes. 
He has inherited the Master's love for humanity and 
his passion that it might be "organized according to the 
will of God." 

3. We must hold no thought of the kingdom which 
will make us Pharisaic in our attitude toward others. 
It is far too easy for the "liberal" to hold in contempt 
the "conservative" because of the narrowness and the 

174 



dogmatism and the materialism, as it seems to him, of 
his intellectual viewpoint. Conversely, the "conserva- 
tive" finds it easy to apply proof texts to the "liberal" 
and to read him out of the kingdom because he fails 
to measure up to his own particular yardstick. That 
was exactly the Pharisaic attitude. Jesus called com- 
mon men to follow Him in the kingdom enterprise. His 
first demand was not for a correct intellectual formula- 
tion of the meaning of the kingdom. He asked an infi- 
nitely harder thing to do but an infinitely easier thing 
to understand, "Follow me." I once rode on an inter- 
urban car from one city to another with a man who 
told me of a book he had just been reading. The book 
gave detailed and exceedingly dogmatic information 
about the kingdom and how and when it would come. 
My friend believed every word of it and evidently 
thought that the author had a private wire to the celes- 
tial regions which gave him inside information on much 
that is hidden from the rest of us. To me the book and 
its thesis were too absurd to warrant discussion, and 
accordingly I was quick to brand my traveling com- 
panion with the same adjective. A few hours later I 
rode back to the city from which we had both come and 
again he of the absurd book was with me. But on the 
return trip I learned of the man's work. He was the 
welfare agent of a great automobile corporation and 
was up to his neck in schemes for making the living 
conditions of ignorant foreigners decent and tolerable. 
He had a very practical social program and was work- 
ing at it in the spirit of Jesus. How he squared his 
theology with his religion I don't quite know, but I am 

175 



thankful that I rode both ways with that man. Ride 
both ways with men before you judge them! 

4. We must hold no thought of the kingdom which 
will let us doubt for a moment that the kingdom will 
ultimately come. The kingdom has come, in just so 
far as men have held to its ultimate triumph with an 
utter and passionate belief. Jesus swept men off their 
feet by just that passion. That was why hard-headed 
Jewish business men left their profitable enterprises to 
follow Him, they believed He told the truth when He 
said, "The time is fully come and the kingdom of God 
is close at hand." They were enthusiasts, wrong- 
headed and superficial no doubt. But forth from that 
little group of disciples has come a stream of influences 
which has gone far toward making a better order of life 
in this world. It is only as men believe with all their 
hearts that Jesus is coming, whether on the clouds of 
heaven or into the social relationships of men, permeat- 
ing industry and education, politics and racial problems, 
that any great advance is possible. And really it is 
possible to contribute to the progress of the kingdom 
whether one holds to the one theory or to the other if 
only these values of which we have been thinking are 
conserved. 

V. THE GOAL OF LIFE FOR THE INDIVIDUAL 

But what about the individual who spends himself 
in the effort to forward Christ's kingdom on earth and 
passes on without sharing in the triumph of its ultimate 
victory? Is there anything more for him? Ought he 
to be content with his small share in its advancement? 

176 



Ought he to quench the passionate desire for life which 
seems to see beyond the allotted three score years and 
ten? And what about the kingdom? Is it more than a 
state of affairs on this earth? When our earth becomes 
uninhabitable after a thousand years or a million years 
or a billion years, will that be the end of the story? 
The beautiful order of life which men through the help 
of God and as they conformed to his will, may have 
then achieved, built as it will be upon the suffering and 
the toil and the prayers of a thousand thousand genera- 
tions of men,— will that beautiful order of life flower 
out for a brief day and then fade? Will "Finis" then be 
written at the close of the chapter of human history? 
These are not idle questions, for human lips have 
formed them since time began, and the answers which 
men give bear very powerfully upon human conduct. 

In our own time these queries have come once more 
to the fore. We had thought ourselves a practical folk, 
living a day at a time, more concerned with this life 
and its concrete problems than with what must be, at 
best, speculations about another life. And then the 
war, — and myriads of young men swept from our sight 
in a few brief years; and the question of Job comes 
once more to our lips, "If a man die, will he live again?" 
What a strangely persistent superstition this belief in 
the future life must seem to be to the skeptical! For 
all down through the ages the majority of men have 
answered Job's query in the affirmative. And yet it is 
not right to say that the Christian belief in the future 
life is but a continuation of this age-old hope. The 
Christian hope is, indeed, quite different from the pre- 

177 



Christian form of the belief in immortality. The belief 
in the on-going of full-orbed personality is quite another 
thing than to believe in a shadowy, passionless exist- 
ence after death as did the Hebrews throughout most 
of their history, and quite different than to believe in 
the Hindu or the Buddhistic karma. The Christian 
hope takes its coloring from the teachings of Jesus al- 
though He Himself was much more reserved in describ- 
ing the future life than some of his followers have been. 
We must eventually turn to his teaching; but first let 
us think of the modern attitudes toward the problem of 
immortality. 

We have witnessed a recrudescence of faith in the 
future life. From many angles men are seeking con- 
firmation of their faith. Science is still extremely con- 
servative with regard to the future life. All that we 
know of personality seems so intimately bound up with 
brain and sense organs that it is certainly going beyond 
the bounds of true science to ask for confirmation here. 
And yet it is unscientific to deny the possibility of the 
continuance of personality after death. And a wealth 
of evidence well within the domain of true science seems 
to show that the mind in its present stage of evolution 
is capable of establishing a dominating influence over 
the body. This cannot be stressed to prove that the 
mind will survive the body, but it leads us to expect it. 

From the realm of half -legitimatized science and 
from the realm of pseudoscience comes a flood of 
psychic phenomena. Many there are who believe that 
existence after death is no longer a faith but an estab- 
lished fact, and many others who cannot go so far 

178 



believe that within a comparatively short time it will 
be possible to prove that men do live on after the transi- 
tion which we call death. But nothing very potent as 
a sanction for present living has resulted from the total 
output of such investigations. 

The Christian Church continues to direct the eyes 
of men to the empty tomb of Jesus, and to the trans- 
formed lives of the disciples; the former a matter of 
record in the gospels, and the latter an incontrovertible 
fact in the experience of the early church. Men who 
doubt the record cannot deny that something momen- 
tous happened to those quavering, faltering, disheart- 
ened disciples which made them powerful evangelists 
of a great good news to humanity. The fact of the 
transformed lives of men who have accepted the Easter 
faith and made it a part of their daily program of living 
is probably, still, more potent with the masses of man- 
kind than the evidence of science or of psychical re- 
search. But there is a stronger basis for faith than the 
empty tomb or the transformed disciples, or perhaps 
we ought rather to say that these are evidences of the 
broader basis for the Easter faith upon which we must 
place our feet. 

VI. JESUS' TEACHING ABOUT THE FUTURE LIFE 

Jesus did not base his belief in immortality on science 
or upon the intimations of immortality in human per- 
sonality or upon communications with the dead. Only 
once did he put into words the basis of that faith which 
was so apparent in his whole attitude toward life. 
When the Sadducees came to him during the last week 

179 



of his earthly life and put to him the stock puzzle with 
which they were accustomed to confuse the Pharisees, 
the puzzle about the much married woman and her 
status in the future, Jesus answered by attacking the 
major premise of their argument. They assumed that 
life in the future world will be upon the same physical 
basis as this earthly life. Such an assumption the 
Pharisees half inclined to accept and hence found it 
difficult to solve the puzzle. Jesus denied the major 
premise and so destroyed the force of their contention. 
Life in the future is not to be lived on the same physical 
plane as this life. But He did not rest content with 
having dexterously avoided their trap. He proceeded 
to state clearly the ground for his faith. "But as touch- 
ing the dead, that they are raised; have ye not read in 
the book of Moses, in the place concerning the Bush, 
how God spake unto him, saying, I am the God of 
Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob? 
He is not the God of the dead, but of the living: ye do 
greatly err." Mark 12:26, 27. This is an argument, 
of course, directed to the Sadducees who recognized no 
authority but the Pentateuch, but it reveals also the 
underlying principle which was the source of Jesus' 
faith and which will be the source likewise of the faith 
of his disciples. God, Jesus says, is a God of persons, 
not a God of processes. Persons are supremely impor- 
tant in his eyes. It is inconceivable that He would 
"scrap" a single PERSON for the sake of any cause 
whatever. The cause which called for the wastage of 
even a little child could not be a cause which has his 
sanction. 

180 



Jesus' teaching about the future life is just an exten- 
sion of his teaching about God. He based it squarely 
upon the character of God. He lived his faith in such a 
God into every relationship of his earthly life, and fac- 
ing the fact of physical death He simply projected that 
faith into the future. For Jesus' passion was not only 
for the kingdom but for persons. The kingdom as He 
saw it was made up of persons. He lavished Himself 
upon individuals. The least was not unworthy of his 
whole endeavor. For Jesus this is just a world of per- 
sons and God is the God of persons, and that He should 
"scrap" one of them is inconceivable in his eyes. "If 
God is at all like what Christ supposed Him to be, 
personal immortality is completely proved." ("Immor- 
tality," by B. H. Streeter, et al., p. 85.) 

Faith in the possibility of a future life is not a differ- 
ent kind of faith, then, from faith in the practicability 
of Jesus' program for this life. If God is not the Father, 
then it is certainly questionable whether the attempt to 
make love the motive power for daily living is anything 
more than a bit of sentimentalism. But if God, the 
God of the universe, is truly a Father, no other way of 
life than that which calls for brotherly conduct is, in 
the end, practicable. It is the same venture of faith in 
the one case as in the other. How tremendous a ven- 
ture no one can realize until he tries it out in the sphere 
of daily shoulder to shoulder living with his fellows. 
The fact of death is no more insuperable than the facts 
of hatred and pain and hunger and disease. Jesus 
seems to expect that men will find proof of their faith, 
not so much in scientific demonstration or in estab- 

181 



lished communications from the other world, as in test- 
ing whether the manner of life based upon the assump- 
tion that God is Love is really the way of life. If it is, 
it is good for all the perplexities of our world. 

But some, like Mr. Wells, feel that the desire for 
immortality is a piece of egotism. "Whether," writes 
Mr. Wells, "we live forever or die to-morrow does not 
affect righteousness. Many people seem to find the 
prospect of a final personal death unendurable. This 
impresses me as egotism. I have no such appetite for 
a separate immortality; what, of me, is identified with 
God, is God; what is not, is of no more permanent value 
than the snows of yesteryear." "There is a note of 
idealism here; but it simply is not true to say that 'it 
does not affect righteousness' whether we live forever 
or die to-morrow. For if the Divine righteousness may 
lightly 'scrap' the individual, human righteousness may 
do the same. The most conspicuous mark of the moral 
level of any community is the value it sets on human 
personality. The moral achievement of the individual 
may be measured largely by his readiness to sacrifice 
his own life for others, but the moral height of a society 
is shown by its reluctance to sacrifice even its least 
worthy members. The disinterestedness which is con- 
tent with a Universe in which his own ego will soon 
cease to be is much to the credit of Mr. Wells ; it would 
not be to God's credit were He equally content. "* 

The whole quality of life which Jesus calls us to 
emulate cries out for more scope for its realization than 
this life can possibly afford. Jesus enhances every 

* Immortality, by B. H. Streeter, et al., pp. 84, 85. 

182 



man's worth in his own eyes because the possibilities of 
personality are opened up before him. Jesus increases 
the significance of people for each other. But friend- 
ships are incomplete here. Jesus gives us an ideal, "Ye 
therefore shall be perfect, as your Heavenly Father is 
perfect." But this life is only the kindergarten in such 
an educational process. Jesus gives us a vision of a 
new social order. But it is unrealized here. Are all 
these values mirages ? Not unless the God whom Jesus 
reveals is also a mirage. 

The Easter faith is just the carrying of Christian 
faith to its ultimate conclusion. 

VII. THE RISEN CHRIST AND MODERN GALILEE 

At the empty tomb the disciples heard the words, 
"He is risen from the dead; and lo, he goeth before you 
into Galilee." Not Jerusalem but Galilee was to be 
their rendezvous with their risen Lord. Jerusalem 
might have meant a glorious kingdom, a restored Israel, 
a Messianic King seated on the throne of his glory with 
the Twelve as his imperial cabinet. Jerusalem stood 
for majestic institutions, and pomp, and pride, and cir- 
cumstance. Their own eyes had been fixed upon it as 
the future seat of the kingdom of Christ. And then 
came the words, "Lo, he goeth before you into Galilee." 
And what did Galilee mean? They knew too well, these 
Galileans. "Since the days of Alexander the vice of the 
East and the West had poured into Palestine. Wrong 
living and wrong thinking had distorted the bodies and 
minds and souls of men. At every turn beggars afflicted 

183 



with all kinds of loathsome diseases, cried for help and 
healing."* And turning their backs upon Jerusalem, 
the golden, they followed their Lord into Galilee with 
its needy men and women. 

Little Galilee has grown into a world. Paul saw it 
expand. He saw it grow into Asia Minor and Mace- 
donia and Achaia and Rome and Spain. He knew Gali- 
lee, the Galilee whither the risen Lord leads the way, to 
be that land where men need Christ and the ministry of 
Christlike men. 

The goal of life is just persons, transformed by the 
spirit of Christ, organized according to the will of God, 
given scope in the eternities for the achievement of that 
full-grown manhood which Christ came to bring to men. 

* Kent : Life and Teaching of Jesus, p. 97. 



184 



Chapter Em 

m % Problems latft 



" "1 >0R we know in part. . . . But now abideth 
jjri faith, hope, love, these three; and the greatest 
-■*- of these is love. Follow after love." No wiser 
words than these have ever been written as touching 
the problems of the religious life. The writer, Paul, 
was not a sentimentalist. He made a massive and sus- 
tained effort to solve the intellectual problems of his 
faith and to give his solutions such formulation as would 
convince and clarify the minds of his readers. Paul 
had the student temperament. He was as keen as a 
hound on the trail of truth. He was scientific in his 
reverence for truth when discovered, for he altered his 
manner of life in accordance with his new discoveries, 
breaking with the old ways at terrific cost to himself in 
persecution. He was passionate in his advocacy of his 
own viewpoint; fertile in argument to establish it; rich 
in illustration to enforce it. Paul was a thinker; not 
in a sloppy, lazy fashion; but as though his life de- 
pended upon it. And yet as the ripened fruit of his 
experience he declared, "we know in part." We have 
been thinking together about the great problems of reli- 
gion. To what purpose? 

I. "WE KNOW IN PART" 

All our meditation upon these great central convic- 
tions of the Christian faith will have borne in upon us 
the truth of Paul's words. Our knowledge is partial. 
The story of the development of an individual and the 
story of the development of the race bear this out. 

187 



Never again do we know as much in proportion to our 
vision of the field of knowledge as we do when we 
finish the grade school. Each forward step in the edu- 
cational journey makes it more painfully evident that 
there is a vast region of unexplored country beyond 
that first range which we took to be the edge of the 
world. By slow steps we discover that our instructor's 
knowledge is but partial; that the books we study are 
sometimes in error; that the whole sum of human 
knowledge, if we could encompass it, would still be 
found to be faulty and incomplete. Within the educa- 
tional history of so young a country as America it is 
recorded that a college professor was once discharged 
because he wrote a book, based upon original research, 
the theory being that the body of knowledge was com- 
plete, and that it was not only unnecessary but posi- 
tively impious to try to unearth new truth. But that is 
not the spirit of our day. What the author of the 
Epistle to the Hebrews wrote about the Word of God 
has become the motto of the scientific method. It is 
" Piercing even to the dividing of soul and spirit, of both 
joints and marrow, and quick to discern the thoughts 
and intents of the heart." But this same scientific 
spirit is very slow to claim final truth. It advances 
ploddingly by patiently accumulating evidence and 
then venturing hypotheses to explain the facts, and 
turning fiercely upon its own hypotheses to assail them 
from every conceivable angle and to find if possible 
the weak spot in the Achilles-like heel of the theory. 
For science confesses that a we know in part." 
The problems of the religious life begin, we said, with 
188 



the questioner, the man behind the query, and he seems 
to be saying more often than not, "I don't know what 
I believe." Do the problems end at the same point? 
Have we gained any ground at all? 

But there is a vast difference between Paul's a we 
know in part" and the student's "I don't know what I 
believe." Paul's accent is upon the certainties of faith, 
not upon the uncertainties. Tremendous certainties run 
all through Paul's writings, "I know whom I have be- 
lieved"; "the wages of sin is death"; "For I am per- 
suaded that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor prin- 
cipalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor 
powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, 
shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which 
is in Christ Jesus our Lord." Paul's is the wholesome 
agnosticism which recognizes the limits set to our 
knowledge but lives by the power of those realities 
which are within our reach. Like Whittier he could 
say, 

I know not where His islands lift 

Their fronded palms in air; 
I only know I cannot drift 

Beyond His love and care. 

"For we know in part" and by the part we know we 
shall live. It is to this end that we have been thinking 
through these problems of faith, keenly conscious that 
we may not hope to reach lasting solutions, but looking 
for those partial glimpses of truth revealed not only in 
mind but in heart which we have already been living 
by without fully recognizing them, and putting them 

189 



into positive and forceful expression in our lives. But 
it is important to think through, as fully and carefully 
as may be, every problem of faith, not alone that we 
may advance the cause of truth but that we may find 
help for ourselves and others in dealing with the spirit- 
ual diseases which weaken the religious life of the 
youth of to-day, as of all days. Some of these maladies 
are the result of wrong thinking and some of them are 
the results of the disillusionment which is part of the 
tragedy of youth. In order that we may see, then, the 
practical use of our study together about a working 
faith, it is our necessary though not very pleasant task 
to diagnose the spiritual ailments of the youth of our 
time. 

II. RELIGIOUS MALNUTRITION 

One of the maladies from which we are suffering in 
our time is religious malnutrition. The children of 
Europe were weakened to the starvation point and de- 
veloped terrible diseases like the rickets, which twisted 
their little bones into hideous shapes, not because they 
did not receive enough to eat, in quantity, but because 
what they ate did not nourish them. Often they ate 
too much. I have seen college and university students 
in their dining halls in Central Europe eat two and 
three soup plates filled with potatoes. They left that 
dining hall with stomachs satisfyingly filled, but in a 
few hours the gnawing pains of hunger were upon them. 
Potatoes are not a complete food, and one can starve on 
them. Not a few students are suffering from religious 
malnutrition. The spiritual food which they receive 

190 



does not nourish them. I have known college graduates 
to boast that they went through college without chang- 
ing in any particular their religious thinking. "The old- 
fashioned religion is good enough for me," is a fine 
phrase if we mean by it that we can do with the warmth, 
the positiveness, the courage of the faith of our fathers. 
Faith in that sense as exhibited by the fathers is 
enough. But faith of that quality will mean a daring 
and venturesome application of religion to every phase 
of the growing life. It will mean that spiritual growth 
must keep pace with physical and mental development. 
But it is the comparative exception to discover youth, 
eager and active in the search for truth in other lines, 
but equally active and eager in maintaining the tradi- 
tional ways of formulating religious truth. It is almost 
the rule to find youth undernourished religiously be- 
cause of no adequate attempt to find and assimilate the 
modern interpretation of the fundamental religious ex- 
periences of the fathers. The fault is not altogether 
with the churches and its agencies, part of the fault lies 
at the door of the student himself. If we actually have 
the intellectual curiosity and initiative upon which we 
pride ourselves, we shall use it in the direction of the 
religious problems. I have seen the amazing effect that 
it has upon a student to discover that it is legitimate 
to use one's mind in the field of religious thinking and 
that, as a matter of fact, some of the most brilliant 
minds that humanity has produced have worked in this 
field. The libraries of any college contain rows of 
books among which are to be found not only the dusty 
tomes which record the outworn theories of past ages, 

191 



as in any other field of knowledge, but also the most 
fascinating expositions of modern thinking along reli- 
gious lines. It is sad but true that many a youth of 
to-day is a religious illiterate, and supposing everybody 
to be as ignorant and as provincial in his religious think- 
ing as he is himself relegates religion to the limbo of 
outworn superstition. Just now when many thinkers 
are declaring that the need of the world is for a revival 
of religion, it ought to sting the student into intellectual 
activity to inform himself as to what the great religious 
movements of the world have been and are to-day. 

In no other field are we so quick to judge a subject 
by the chance fact of the man who presents it or the 
manner in which it is presented, as in the field of reli- 
gion. This is, to be sure, an unconscious tribute to reli- 
gion itself in its recognition that genuine religion lies 
deeper than words and finds its truest expression in the 
life. But so often it is the trivial or the superficial 
which turns the tide. In a certain great university not 
long ago an unfortunate mistake made by a college 
preacher made him the laughing stock of the university, 
and actually brought religion itself into disrepute. This 
particular preacher is doing far more for humanity than 
ninety-nine out of every hundred of his auditors will 
ever accomplish. We are spiritually malnourished 
religiously because of this very tendency to doubt a 
truth, or rather to refuse to consider it because we don't 
chance to like the way in which it is presented. This 
is a danger to which the crowd mind is especially sus- 
ceptible, wiiether the crowd be from one stratum of 
society or another. 

192 



We live in a world which is spiritually malnourished. 
There is an abundance of religion in the world, but the 
social and physical life has outgrown it. It is suited 
to the small neighborhood where industry is yet in the 
primitive stage, but we live in a world of complex indus- 
trial and social conditions, and men simply have not 
learned how to apply their good intentions to this diffi- 
cult problem. This is the challenge to the student of 
to-day. To meet it he must ask as we have been trying 
to ask in these pages, what religion is, fundamentally, 
and what the Christian religion is, and what it proposes 
for human life and relationships. 

III. SPIRITUAL PARALYSIS 

An equally dangerous, though exactly opposite, reli- 
gious disease is spiritual paralysis. Where ten young 
people grow mentally and physically and remain chil- 
dren in their religious thinking, and finally relegate their 
religious thinking to an out-of-the-way compartment of 
their brains and lock the door and throw the key away, 
one young person does face the problem of keeping 
pace religiously with the growing world of ideal in 
other realms. And more often than not, this one youth 
suffers symptoms of spiritual paralysis, if he does not 
succumb entirely to the disease and live on physically 
and mentally without being able to move hand or foot 
spiritually. The natural history of this disease runs 
something like this. A student comes to college and 
suddenly finds himself in a religious atmosphere which 
is quite different from the one he breathed at home. 
Prom the very nature of the case he has never thought 

193 



of questioning the fundamentals of the Christian faith. 
He has lived in a community where the leaders of 
thought and action have gone beyond the most acute 
stage of questioning. It is not that they are unaware, 
necessarily, of the difficulties of belief, but that they 
have already solved some of the questions, and the 
others they recognize as past solution. There are prac- 
tical tasks that call for the doing, and institutions which 
must be run, and quite naturally they forget that the 
youths in their midst are not in the same calm state of 
mind. And so the youth comes up to college, either 
never having questioned the great verities which he has 
been taught, or else supposing that he is alone in such 
questionings and ought therefore to sternly repress his 
doubts. He has been accustomed not only to a certain 
type of religious thinking but also to a certain type of 
religious observance, richer in emotional warmth per- 
haps, than he will find in a college community. At 
college nothing seems to be finally settled. All the 
great verities are open to question. His professors 
speak of certain truths in quite a tentative fashion, not 
necessarily because they do not believe them but be- 
cause they are trying to face these religious problems in 
the same way that they would approach any other field 
of investigation. The older students pride themselves 
on the liberating influences which have enabled them 
to discard certain "superstitions." These same "super- 
stitions" have never been separated by the youth's Sun- 
day school teachers from the really central pillars of 
the structure of faith; and when he sees a bit of the 
scaffolding go, he assumes that the whole edifice must 

194 



presently crumble. In short, instead of a community 
about him in which he is the only doubter, as he sup- 
poses, he finds himself surrounded by a community in 
which he is the only believer, again as he supposes. 
When a company of people get together with that gen- 
eral attitude of mind, it is not at all strange that the 
chill of spiritual paralysis does sometimes begin to 
creep over the spirit of youth. 

We have been trying in these studies to deal with this 
disease as well as the disease of religious malnutrition. 
"I'm not quite sure if the Bible is inspired," somebody 
says, and begins to question its science or its history. 
We have tried to meet that question not at all in a 
theoretical but in a very practical way, by showing how 
it opens up the deepest experiences of men's hearts, 
revealing how they found God, how Jesus led them in 
their thinking and their experience, how they prayed, 
what faith meant to them, and what repentance and the 
future life. We have tried to apply that to our own 
experience. That is the purpose of the Bible as I under- 
stand it. Have you ever seen an old-fashioned book- 
mark for Bibles with suggestions like these printed on 
it: When you are blue read such and such a Psalm, If 
in doubt read such a chapter and such a verse, If about 
to go on a journey read so and so? I am not vouching 
for the correctness of the Biblical knowledge or exe- 
gesis of the maker of those bookmarks, but I am sure 
that he knew what the Bible is for. When we find books 
that have more recent scientific information than the 
Bible, we shall undoubtedly look to them for our scien- 
tific knowledge. And when we find a book which can 

195 



tell us more about God and his ways, and men and their 
search and discovery of Him through Jesus, we shall 
use it, but such a book simply does not exist. 

In the same way we have tried to meet each problem, 
not primarily from the standpoint of theory, but from 
the developing mental and social experience of youth. 
Think of the questions which arise and then survey the 
ground which our studies have covered, and ask your- 
self if they have aided you to escape the chill of spiritual 
paralysis. 

IV. DISILLUSIONMENT 

But there is one fell disease which we have not reme- 
died and which we cannot remedy in the pages of any 
book, and that is disillusionment. May we turn, as has 
been our habit in this little book, to a Biblical character 
for help? Peter is a splendid example of a man who 
was disillusioned, terribly disillusioned, and recovered. 
Fickle, impetuous, hot-headed, over-enthusiastic Peter! 
We like him, we say, because he is so like us. He is a 
cartoon of human nature, wherein the common weak- 
nesses of us all are delineated, perhaps with a touch of 
exaggeration; we hope for our own sake that it is ex- 
aggeration. But to describe Peter as changeable and 
impetuous does not go to the heart of the matter. He 
was never quite able to free his mind from the illusion 
that Jesus was to be the inaugurator of a glorious 
earthly kingdom, with himself as king, and the twelve 
as governors. The great tragedy of Peter's life was the 
disillusionment which came to him. When the soldiers 
came to the garden of Gethsemane to arrest Jesus, Peter 

196 



drew his sword and hacked off the ear of the high 
priest's servant, confidently expecting, I believe, that he 
was striking the first blow in Armageddon, the final bat- 
tle between good and evil which prophets had foretold, 
and looking for the immediate backing of twelve legions 
of angels and the introduction of the glorious new 
kingdom. He was disillusioned. No angels came. His 
Master gently rebuked him, healed the severed ear, and 
allowed Himself to be led off by the soldiers. Can you 
imagine the tumult in poor Peter's mind as he followed 
Jesus to the high priest's courtyard? I don't wonder 
that Peter told the maid that he didn't know what she 
was talking about when she accused him of being one of 
Jesus' followers. His world was turned upside down. 
He had to do his thinking all over again. Peter was 
like a man following a beautiful mirage. The desert 
trail had been made livable for him by the splendors he 
saw ahead — and then he arrived to find that his oasis 
was an illusion. Is it any wonder that in the first pangs 
of that disillusionment Peter denied that there was any 
such thing as water since his particular oasis had 
vanished? 

Through the dark days of his disillusionment he 
must have clung to one reality — Jesus had lived, He 
had walked and talked with them, the charm and power 
of his presence was no mirage, even though the kind of 
kingdom they had built up around this Jesus was dis- 
solved. Perhaps Peter and the others thought back 
over the old days. One would remember his words, 
"The kingdom of God is within you." Another would 
recall that Isaiah's great poems about the Suffering 

197 



Servant of Jehovah had been much upon the Master's 
mind. Slowly the house of thought which had tumbled 
about Peter's ears began to be rebuilt. His eyes began 
to open to new vistas of possibility. And then came the 
vision of the risen Christ, and they knew that He lived 
indeed, and after that the day of Pentecost when the 
Spirit descended upon them. Faith was rekindled. 
Disillusion gave way to vision. Listen to Peter as he 
closes his powerful sermon to the assembled Jews after 
the experience of God at Pentecost. "Let all the house 
of Israel therefore know assuredly, that God hath made 
Him both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom ye cruci- 
fied." 

This story of Peter's inner development is abun- 
dantly worth our attention because it is a typical 
experience which comes to everyone in one form or 
another. But the series of disillusionments which is 
most critical comes during the change from youth to 
maturity. The key to future usefulness and success 
lies very largely in the right personal adjustment to the 
inevitable tragedies of disillusionment. If they make 
people cynical and sophisticated, if they pull us down 
to the level of "things as they are," they mark the 
tragedy of youth. If on the other hand, disillusionment 
results in vision, if the discovery of what men and things 
really are, brutal though that discovery may be and dis- 
heartening in its effects upon the untroubled youth, 
opens his eyes to see what he may do to help, he has 
found the way to life eternal. 

Two or three instances of this type of experience 
may bring home to "the business and bosom" of each 

198 



of us just what this disease is. I talked with a father 
of his son. "Next autumn my son will enter such and 
such a college," he told me. "That college/' he said 
naming it, "has always been his ideal." And then I 
thought of that boy, whom I know and of the experi- 
ences ahead of him. The college of which his father 
spoke has been talked to him since he could under- 
stand speech. He has idealized every part and parcel 
of its life. He will go up to that college next autumn 
to enter the Heaven of his hopes. And what will hap- 
pen to him? He will be disillusioned. It cannot be 
otherwise, for although that college is a splendid insti- 
tution of learning, none better, it is a place where 
human beings live and work and play. That college is 
just life, that's all; life in a splendid setting with noble 
traditions and helpful associations; but life with its 
temptations and its struggles and its defeats. He will 
have to learn with Tom Brown at Rugby, "the meaning 
of his life: that it was no fool's or sluggard's paradise 
into which he had wandered by chance, but a battle 
field ordained from of old, where there are no specta- 
tors, but the youngest must take his side, and the stakes 
are life and death." And happy that youth if in the 
break-up of his boyish dreams he finds a friend like 
the Doctor of Tom Brown's time, a clean true man who 
may help him to see beyond disillusionment to vision, 
and who will lead him to the Man of Galilee. 

And then the inevitable adjustment of the college 
years ! You remember your ideas of what college days 
would be, your high hopes, your youthful day dreams, 
your illogical conceptions of God and man and the 

199 



world. What has happened to these? There have been 
epoch-making changes in your thinking. The world 
war has made a new world we say, but each college 
generation sees changes in individual students more 
drastic, and surely more rapid than the world war has 
effected. As a world we still have a feeling that we can 
yet recover the peace and prosperity of ante-bellum 
days. 

But you know there is no going back to ante-college 
days. You see now that many of your ideas, like 
Peter's, were illusions. What have you saved from the 
wreckage? Has vision emerged, clear and steady? A 
vision of service, more real if not so glittering just be- 
cause the illusions have been swept away? Do you care 
as much about the new ideals as you did about the old ? 
Or has the sweeping away of the outworn form of think- 
ing robbed you of enthusiasm ? That was the fine thing 
about Peter: he experienced a radical transformation 
in his thinking; no student was ever harder hit by an 
unexpected undermining of cherished ideas than was 
Peter; his world tumbled about his ears; but when he 
adjusted himself the same fire flamed in Peter's eye! 
That is a good test: Are you as much on fire for what 
you call the broader vision of truth as you were for the 
old? 

The world is passing through this experience of dis- 
illusionment on a wide scale to-day. Men fought and 
died for the realization of ideals. It seemed that a 
better day was about to dawn. And now we know that 
many of those hopes were illusions. Like Peter, many 
people are denying with an oath that they ever had 

2 00 



anything to do with "making a world safe for democ- 
racy," or that they were on terms of speaking acquaint- 
ance with a "new world order" or "open covenants 
openly arrived at," and the world seems to have slipped 
down to the level of its disillusionments. Will vision, a 
clearer understanding of history, a better knowledge of 
differences of race and environment emerge as the basis 
for a surer if more gradual progress? 

Disillusionment is a fact in personal and national his- 
tory, indeed, in human history. What is its cure? In 
Peter's case there was one fact which remained un- 
shaken by the earthquake which shattered his concep- 
tion, the fact of Christ. Peter's ideas about Christ, 
about the kingdom which he should inaugurate, about 
when it should come and whom it should include had all 
to be revised. But the fact of Christ remained. Peter 
and the others could not escape the fact that Jesus lived 
a triumphant life upon this earth ; that his life matched 
in its actuality the hopes of poor disillusioned men. 
Here was something to tie to, and it was Christ Himself 
who saved Peter and countless men since, who, in the 
welter of disillusionment and problems insoluble have 
clung to Him. His way of life is ever the hope of the 
disheartened and discouraged. That such a life has 
been lived, and that Jesus actually did impart his spirit 
to men who would follow Him — there lies the hope 
for us. 

V. WHAT IT MEANS TO BE A CHRISTIAN 

This last religious malady, disillusionment, cannot be 
met by correct thinking. It can only be cured by 

201 



contact with men who have kept the faith. And when 
in moments of greatest despair it seems as though no one 
could be found who is pure and unselfish and true, there 
is always Jesus. That He lived here under the condi- 
tions of our life is the most cheering thing in human 
history. Disillusionment can be cured only as men 
actually follow the way of life which He trod, as they 
are actually Christian. But what does it mean to be 
a Christian? 

Someone once remarked that one could tell that 
America was a Christian country by the crosses on the 
church steeples, by the inscriptions on the tombstones, 
and by the profanity on the streets. There is more 
than a grain of truth in this rather cynical remark. 
These evidences of the power of Christ once operative 
in our life cannot be gainsaid. Men only swear by that 
which they count most sacred. But Christianity is a 
dead thing indeed if it only finds these cold, formal or 
perverted ways of expression. 

We are accustomed to think of a Christian as one 
who performs certain religious acts or accepts and sup- 
ports certain religious institutions. The Christian is 
one who prays, reads the Bible, attends the Sunday 
school, subscribes to certain credal statements and in a 
variety of ways backs up the established order of Chris- 
tian conduct and procedure. But to define a Christian 
by cataloging what the average Christian does, is to 
mistake the manifestations of a thing for the thing 
itself. There were Christians before any of these forms 
of expression, at least as we know them to-day, were 
in existence. There were Christians before there were 



202 



church buildings or creeds or even New Testaments. 
Consequently we must test every religious act and in- 
stitution by something else. The result of this attitude 
will be that we shall never hold any of the historic 
usages of the followers of Jesus too lightly, remember- 
ing that they are the result of the attempt to give ex- 
pression to the way of Christ or to get help in living it. 
On the other hand no act or institution will be found too 
sacred to be continually tested by the spirit of Christ 
to discover if it actually does express or nourish that 
spirit. 

A Christian is not infrequently defined as one who 
accepts the ethical program of Jesus. But this again is 
mistaking the manifestations of a thing for the thing 
itself. The ethical program of Jesus is impossibly high 
and hard, unless motive power for its achievement is 
available for ordinary people. Review our thought in 
chapter three about the way in which Jesus' ethical pro- 
gram leads inevitably to a relationship with God as its 
mainspring. In the same way service is but a mani- 
festation of this relationship. The Christian is one who 
is what Jesus was and who serves as Jesus served, to the 
utmost limit of his ability; but he is what he is, and does 
what he does because he follows Jesus into the knowl- 
edge of, and experience of God which Jesus reveals. 
This has been central throughout our discussion. When 
we have done with speculating, tangled as we often are 
in the web of our own thinking, the clear, quiet voice 
of the Master sounds over the tumult of the world, "If 
any man would come after me, let him deny himself, 
and take up his cross, and follow me." Following Jesus 

203 



means that He determines henceforth the relationships 
of our lives, with God and with men. It meant that to 
the first disciples and it must mean that to the end of 
discipleship. 

Perhaps the best definition of what it means to be a 
Christian is found in six one-syllable words from the 
pen of Paul, "For me to live is Christ." The plain 
meaning of those words is just: For me to live is for 
Christ to live in and through me. Not that Paul would 
pretend to the purity or the power of Christ, but that 
he counts those moments to be real life when the spirit 
and ideals of Jesus are finding expression through him. 
Such a way of life is incontrovertible. It is truth incar- 
nate, the Word become flesh and dwelling among us full 
of grace and truth. And so it is that Paul's great verses 
with which we began this chapter form the fitting con- 
clusion to a book in which we have sought to know more 
fully the things of the kingdom. 

"For we know in part. . . . But now abideth faith, 
hope, love, these three; and the greatest of these is love. 
Follow after love." 



204 



Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process. 
Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
Treatment Date: July 2005 

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